Wall Compensation for Ultra Wideband Applications

Abstract

Due to their low frequency contents, ultra wideband (UWB) signals have the ability to penetrate walls and obstacles. As the signal propagates through these obstacles, it gets attenuated, slows down, and gets dispersed. This paper demonstrates wall compensation for through-wall imaging, localization and communication receiver design purposes by first characterizing wave propagation through various building materials in the UWB frequency range. Knowledge of the walls obtained from the wall characterization is used to estimate and correct the position accuracy of a target object located behind the walls using three proposed methods namely; constant amplitude and delay (CDL), frequency dependent data (FFD), and data fitting methods (FIT). The obtained results indicated relatively acceptable measure of wall compensation for the three methods. Results from such work provide insight on how to develop algorithms for effective target position estimation in imaging and localization applications. They are also useful for channel modelling and link budget analysis.