An improved TOA estimation algorithm based on denoised MVDR for B5G positioning

Abstract

This paper proposes an improved minimum variance distortionless response (MVDR) based TOA estimation algorithm for 5G NR signals under multipath environments. The proposed algorithm achieves high resolution by exploiting a large number of subcarriers of 5G signals and reduces the dimension of the covariance matrix involved in MVDR substantially by utilizing a novel smoothing scheme. Since MVDR requires a relatively high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), a denoising method is used to improve the TOA estimation performance. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm achieves much higher resolution than the Bartlett beamformer (BF) and the TOA estimation accuracy remains high over a wide range of SNRs.