Receiver Design for Time-Based Ranging with IEEE 802.11b Signals

Abstract EN

This paper presents a ranging receiver architecture able to timestamp IEEE 802.11b Wireless LAN signals with sub-100 picosecond precision enabling time-based range measurements.

Starting from the signal model, the performance of the proposed architecture is assessed in terms of statistical bounds when perturbed by zero-mean additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) as well as in case of multipath propagation.

Results of the proposed architecture, implemented in a Field Programmable Gate Array-(FPGA-) based prototype, are presented for different environments.

For AWGN channels, the prototype system is able to attain an accuracy of 1.2 cm while the ranging accuracy degrades in dynamic multipath scenarios to about 0.6 m for 80% of the measurements due to the limited bandwidth of the signal.