Analysis of Multipath Mitigation Techniques with Land Mobile Satellite Channel Model

Multipath is undesirable for Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) receivers, since the reception of multipath can create a significant distortion to the shape of the correlation function leading to an error in the receivers’ position estimate. Many multipath mitigation techniques exist in the literature to deal with the multipath propagation problem in the context of GNSS. The multipath studies in the literature are often based on optimistic assumptions, for example, assuming a static two-path channel or a fading channel with a Rayleigh or a Nakagami distribution. But, in reality, there are a lot of channel modeling issues, for example, satellite-to-user geometry, variable number of paths, variable path delays and gains, Non Line-Of-Sight (NLOS) path condition, receiver movements, etc. that are kept out of consideration when analyzing the performance of these techniques. Therefore, this is of utmost importance to analyze the performance of different multipath mitigation techniques in some realistic measurement-based channel models, for example, the Land Multipath is undesirable for Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) receivers, since the reception of multipath can create a significant distortion to the shape of the correlation function leading to an error in the receivers’ position estimate. Many multipath mitigation techniques exist in the literature to deal with the multipath propagation problem in the context of GNSS. The multipath studies in the literature are often based on optimistic assumptions, for example, assuming a static two-path channel or a fading channel with a Rayleigh or a Nakagami distribution. But, in reality, there are a lot of channel modeling issues, for example, satellite-to-user geometry, variable number of paths, variable path delays and gains, Non Line-Of-Sight (NLOS) path condition, receiver movements, etc. that are kept out of consideration when analyzing the performance of these techniques. Therefore, this is of utmost importance to analyze the performance of different multipath mitigation techniques in some realistic measurement-based channel models, for example, the Land Mobile Satellite (LMS) channel model [1]-[4], developed at the German Aerospace Center (DLR). The DLR LMS channel model is widely used for simulating the positioning accuracy of mobile satellite navigation receivers in urban outdoor scenarios. The main objective of this paper is to present a comprehensive analysis of some of the most promising techniques with the DLR LMS channel model in varying multipath scenarios. Four multipath mitigation techniques are chosen herein for performance comparison, namely, the narrow Early-Minus-Late (nEML), the High Resolution Correlator, the C/N0-based two stage delay tracking technique, and the Reduced Search Space Maximum Likelihood (RSSML) delay estimator. The first two techniques are the most popular and traditional ones used in nowadays GNSS receivers, whereas the later two techniques are comparatively new and are advanced techniques, recently proposed by the authors. In addition, the implementation of the RSSML is optimized here for a narrow-bandwidth receiver configuration in the sense that it now requires a significantly less number of correlators and memory than its original implementation. The simulation results show that the reduced-complexity RSSML achieves the best multipath mitigation performance in moderate-to-good carrier-to-noise density ratio with the DLR LMS channel model in varying multipath scenarios

Smart Passive Localization Using Time Difference of Arrival

A smart passive localization system using time difference of arrival (TDoA) measurements is designed and analyzed with the goal of providing the position information for the construction of frequency allocation maps

Cramer-Rao bounds in the estimation of time of arrival in fading channels

This paper computes the Cramer-Rao bounds for the time of arrival estimation in a multipath Rice and Rayleigh fading scenario, conditioned to the previous estimation of a set of propagation channels, since these channel estimates (correlation between received signal and the pilot sequence) are sufficient statistics in the estimation of delays. Furthermore, channel estimation is a constitutive block in receivers, so we can take advantage of this information to improve timing estimation by using time and space diversity. The received signal is modeled as coming from a scattering environment that disperses the signal both in space and time. Spatial scattering is modeled with a Gaussian distribution and temporal dispersion as an exponential random variable. The impact of the sampling rate, the roll-off factor, the spatial and temporal correlation among channel estimates, the number of channel estimates, and the use of multiple sensors in the antenna at the receiver is studied and related to the mobile subscriber positioning issue. To our knowledge, this model is the only one of its kind as a result of the relationship between the space-time diversity and the accuracy of the timing estimation.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Multipath-assisted maximum-likelihood indoor positioning using UWB signals

Multipath-assisted indoor positioning (using ultrawideband signals) exploits the geometric information contained in deterministic multipath components. With the help of a-priori available floorplan information, robust localization can be achieved, even in absence of a line-of-sight connection between anchor and agent. In a recent work, the Cramér-Rao lower bound has been derived for the position estimation variance using a channel model which explicitly takes into account diffuse multipath as a stochastic noise process in addition to the deterministic multipath components. In this paper, we adapt this model for position estimation via a measurement likelihood function and evaluate the performance for real channel measurements. Performance results confirm the applicability of this approach. A position accuracy better than 2.5 cm has been obtained in 90% of the estimates using only one active anchor at a bandwidth of 2GHz and robustness against non-line-of-sight situations has been demonstrated

Adaptive DS-CDMA multiuser detection for time variant frequency selective Rayleigh fading channel

The current digital wireless mobile system such as IS-95, which is based on direct sequence Code Division Multiple Access (DS-CDMA) technology, will not be able to meet the growing demands for multimedia service due to low information exchanging rate. Its capacity is also limited by multiple accessed interference (MAI) signals. This work focuses on the development of adaptive algorithms for multiuser detection (MUD) and interference suppression for wideband direct sequence code division multiple access (DS-CDMA) systems over time-variant frequency selective fading channels. In addition, channel acquisition and delay estimation techniques are developed to combat the uncertainty introduced by the wireless propagation channel. This work emphasizes fast and simple techniques that can meet practical needs for high data rate signal detection. Most existing literature is not suitable for the large delay spread in wideband systems due to high computational/ hardware complexity. A de-biasing decorrelator is developed whose computational complexity is greatly reduced without sacrificing performance. An adaptive bootstrap symbolbased signal separator is also proposed for a time-variant channel. These detectors achieve MUD for asynchronous, large delay spread, fading channels without training sequences. To achieve high data rate communication, a finite impulse response (FIR) filter based detector is presented for M-ary QAM modulated signals in a multipath Rayleigh fading channel. It is shown that the proposed detector provides a stable performance for QAM signal detection with unknown fading and phase shift. It is also shown that this detector can be easily extended to the reception of any M-ary quadrature modulated signal. A minimum variance decorrelating (MVD) receiver with adaptive channel estimator is presented in this dissertation. It provides comparable performance to a linear MMSE receiver even in a deep fading environment and can be implemented blindly. Using the MVD receiver as a building-block, an adaptive multistage parallel interference cancellation (PIC) scheme and a successive interference cancellation (SIC) scheme were developed. The total number of stages is kept at a minimum as a result of the accurate estimating of the interfering users at the earliest stages, which reduces the implementation complexity, as well as the processing delay. Jointly with the MVD receiver, a new transmit diversity (TD) scheme, called TD-MVD, is proposed. This scheme improves the performance without increasing the bandwidth. Unlike other TD techniques, this TDMVD scheme has the inherent advantage to overcome asynchronous multipath transmission. It brings flexibility in the design of TD antenna systems without restrict signal coordination among those multiple transmissions, and applicable for both existing and next generation of CDMA systems. A maximum likelihood based delay and channel estimation algorithm with reduced computational complexity is proposed. This algorithm uses a diagonal simplicity technique as well as the asymptotically uncorrelated property of the received signal in the frequency domain. In combination with oversampling, this scheme does not suffer from a singularity problem and the performance quickly approaches the Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB) while maintaining a computational complexity that is as low as the order of the signal dimension