Assessment of the contribution of time reversal on a UWB localization system for railway applications

UWB radio has the potential to offer good perfor- mance in terms of localization precision. Time Reversal chan- nel pre-filtering facilitates signal detection and also helps to increase the received energy in a targeted area. This paper assesses the quantitative and qualitative contributions of the Time Reversal (TR) technique associated with an Ultra Wide- band (UWB) localization system applied to a railway odometry problem. The analytical and simulation results for Power Delay Profile, equivalent channel model and focusing gain of the TR- UWB are given. The contribution of the TR technique associ- ated with UWB radio to enhance the localization resolution is analysed. To perform these studies, and to be representative of the proposed railway application, a deterministic channel model is used. The analytical simulation and experimental results show that time reversal has very promising characteristics regarding its association with the UWB in terms of localization error. These results also indicate that the TR-UWB technique delivers improved performance over UWB only localization approach, that could benefit the development of the proposed railway application.