Time-Reversal UWB Positioning Beacon for Railway Application

This paper studies a new positioning beacon for railway transport using Ultra Wideband (UWB) radio and Time Reversal (TR) techniques. UWB radio has the potential to offer a good level of performance in terms of localization accuracy. Time Reversal channel pre-filtering facilitates signal detection and also helps increasing the received energy in the targeted area. In this paper, we evaluate the characteristics of TR technique in terms of temporal focusing. The theoretical and simulation results for Power Delay Profile, equivalent channel model and focusing gain of TR-UWB are given. We analyze the contribution of Time Reversal associated with UWB technology to enhance the localization resolution. The IEEE 802.15.3achannel models are used to evaluate the performance of this system. In terms of localization error, the theoretical and simulation results show that TR-UWB technique delivers improved performance over the UWB localization approach.