Modified phase-only correlator with kurtosis-based amplified-noise suppression

In this paper, a Modified Phase-Only Correlator (MPOC) is proposed for resolving overlapped Ultra Wideband (UWB) radio pulses in order to achieve high-resolution multi-target UWB ranging. A Phase-Only Correlator (POC) is able to deconvolve the multi-target UWB channel from the received signal spectrum and its impulse-like output enables it to resolve UWB signals that are overlapping. However, the deconvolved channel is often corrupted by amplified noise arising from spectral nulls in the local template. To mitigate this problem, a MPOC which consists of a POC followed by a kurtosis-based noise suppression module is developed to suppress the amplified noise while maintaining the sharpness of the MPOC output. This enables the MPOC to achieve Time-of-Arrival (ToA) resolution much smaller than the UWB pulse duration. The excellent ToA detection performance of the proposed MPOC is verified by experimental measurement.