Dual polarization beamforming algorithm for multipath mitigation in GNSS

Abstract

This paper treats the problem of line-of-sight (LOS) parameter estimation in strong multipath environments. In the case of highly temporally and spatially correlated LOS and multipath signals, such as urban canyons, common multipath mitigation methods are highly degraded, as signal separation cannot be performed in the spatio temporal domain. In this case, we exploit the LOS and multipath polarization diversity to decouple the signals using an antenna array with right-hand-circular polarization (RHCP) and left-hand-circular polarization (LHCP) feeds. The multipath direction- of-arrival (DOA) and polarization coefficients can effectively be estimated from the LHCP spatial covariance matrix. The LOS DOA can be estimated from the RHCP spatial covariance matrix. The spatial covariance matrices are calculated from the outputs of a matched correlator bank. The DOA and polarization estimates are used to implement a dual polarization beamformer, which maximizes the LOS energy and suppresses multipath energy over both polarizations. The LOS time-delay is estimated from the beamformer output with a maximum-likelihood estimator with a significantly reduced number of parameters and computational complexity in comparison to a full model estimator. Simulation results for GPS show that the proposed dual polarization beamforming algorithm performs better than an equivalent single-polarization beamformer in a dense multipath environment.