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

This paper presents a ranging receiver architectureable 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 theproposed architecture is assessed in terms of statistical boundswhen perturbed by zero-mean additive white Gaussian noise(AWGN) as well as in case of multipath propagation. Results ofthe proposed architecture, implemented in a Field ProgrammableGate Array-(FPGA-) based prototype, are presented for differentenvironments. For AWGN channels, the prototype system is ableto attain an accuracy of 1.2 cm while the ranging accuracydegrades in dynamic multipath scenarios to about 0.6 m for 80%of the measurements due to the limited bandwidth of the signal