Patent ID: 8259829

Claim:
A method for estimating a time-of-arrival of a received signal y(t), the method comprising the steps of: generating a plurality of frequency-domain samples (Y( 0 ), Y( 1 ), . . . , Y(K−1) from the received signal y(t); estimating a correlation matrix {tilde over (R)} YY from the plurality of frequency-domain samples; calculating a signal energy distribution with respect to different propagation delays from the correlation matrix {tilde over (R)} YY ; and finding a delay value ({tilde over (τ)} 0 ) at which the signal energy distribution exceeds a certain threshold P th , the delay value ({tilde over (τ)} 0 ) representing the time-of-arrival estimation; wherein the signal energy distribution is given by a computation of a pseudo-periodogram; wherein the pseudo-periodogram takes the form of P n (τ)= e τ H {tilde over (R)} YY ( n ) e τ wherein {tilde over (R)} YY (n) is the previously estimated correlation matrix of the sampled signal in the frequency domain corresponding to an n-th sample interval, e τ =[1e −jω 0 τ . . . e −jω 0 (K−1)τ ] T is a delay-signature vector, and wherein ω 0 =2 π/K, τ is the temporal delay and K is the number of frequency samples at each observation vector.