This paper deals with the estimation of the time of arrival (TOA) of ultra-wideband signals under IEEE 802.15.4a channel models. The proposed approach is based on a randomness test and consists of determining whether an autoregressive (AR) process modeling an energy frame is random or not by using a distance to measure the randomness. The proposed method uses a threshold that is derived analytically according to a preset false alarm probability. To highlight the effectiveness of the developed approach, simulation setups as well as real data experiments are conducted to assess the performance of the new TOA estimation algorithm. Thereby, the proposed method is compared with the cell averaging constant false alarm rate technique, the threshold comparison algorithm, and the technique based on maximum energy selection with search back. The obtained results are promising, considering both simulations and collected real-life data.