An effective pre-filtering method with a propagator for TOA-based range estimation using chirp signal

In this letter, an effective pre-filtering method is proposed with Propagator for accurate time-of-arrival (TOA)-based range estimations. For TOA estimation using subspace fitting techniques such as Propagator, the received signals must be transformed into sinusoid. After the transformation, the bandwidth of the sinusoids is no longer dependent on the transmitted baseband signal but on channel parameters. By applying the pre-filtering method with the sinusoids, we can remove the outband noise of the sinusoids and this leads to more accurate TOA estimation due to the noise reduction. The effectiveness of the proposed pre-filtering method was analyzed and verified through Monte-carlo simulations in additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and multipath channels.