High-resolution ranging method based on low-rate parallel random sampling

In this paper, we propose a low-rate high-resolution ranging method for UWB (up to several GHz of sampling rate) ranging system. It exploits compressed sensing (CS) theory and a parallel sampling ADCs structure based on random projection (PSRP). To guarantee the effective application of CS on the received signal, we construct a dictionary in which the atoms are time-shifted versions of the transmitted signal. Hence the received signal can be low-rate sampled by PSRP. For an UWB ranging system using PSRP instead of the newly proposed analog-to-information converter, it possesses the universality of dictionary atoms, lower sampling rate and better performance for noisy signal. Additionally, since the dictionary size in this work can be adjusted flexibly, a desired high resolution can be achieved. The simulation results confirm these advantages via a noisy received signal (SNR = 16 dB) which contains five target echoes. Though the received signal is sampled at less 10% of Nyquist rate, the probability of echo detection is over 95% and the distance resolution reaches the optimal of the conventional ranging method.