Method and system for joint time-of-arrival and amplitude estimation based on a super-resolution technique

Abstract

In a geolocation application, a method is provided to jointly estimate the time-of-arrival (TOA) and the amplitude of a received signal based on super-resolution technique. The super-resolution joint TOA-amplitude estimators are provided based on either the expectation-maximization (EM), parallel-interference-cancellation space-alternating generalized expectation maximization (PIC-SAGE) or serial-interference-cancellation SAGE (SIC-SAGE). The SIC-SAGE estimator minimizes the ranging estimation error especially under a non-line-of-sight (NLOS) condition. The SIC-SAGE estimator is a simplified version of the maximum likelihood estimator with more stable performance in a multipath rich environment, such as the ultra-wideband (UWB) based applications. These techniques provide the following benefits: 1) it is generic, so that signal processing can be deployed on both time-domain (e.g., UWB impulse-radio) and frequency-domain (e.g., multi-band orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (MB-OFDM)) based transceiver schemes and applicable for both UWB and non-UWB systems; 2) it is robust especially under NLOS condition and multipath rich environment.