Direction finding receiver for UWB impulse radio signal in multipath environment

In this paper, we propose a direction finding (DF) receiver for ultra wideband impulse radio (UWB‐IR) signal in a realistic multipath environment. The receiver uses an array of antenna, where each antenna is connected to a proposed propagation‐delay estimation structure. The advantage of the proposed structure is that it outputs a trapezoidal signal whose amplitude reflects the propagation delay and thus relaxes the sampling rate requirement of the analog‐to‐digital‐converter (ADC). The angle‐of‐arrival (AOA) is estimated from the vector of propagation delays measured with respect to reference antenna. Because these estimated delays contain outliers, we propose a simple AOA estimation algorithm based on minimum fractional‐distance search. Experimental results based on simulation show that the proposed DF receiver achieves better performance compared with the minimum ?₁‐ and ?₂‐based (least‐squares based) distance search. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.