Phase-Detection-Based Range Estimation With Robust Chinese Remainder Theorem

Abstract

The radio interferometric positioning system can measure distance by using the wavelength of the carried radio wave from the relative phase offset of the interference signal. All of these measurements suffer from the phase ambiguity problem and are inevitably corrupted by noise in systems. In this paper, we propose to resolve the given problems by the robust Chinese remainder theorem (CRT). By exploiting the angular circular distance between two vectors, we propose the vector-based robust CRT (Vec-CRT). To further improve estimation performance, we propose the maximum-likelihood-estimation-based robust CRT (MLE-CRT). Compared with the existing range estimation algorithms, both of the proposed algorithms provide better performances. In particular, the robust MLE-CRT achieves the best performance and the least computational complexity among all the competitors. Simulations are presented to verify the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed algorithms.