The Effect of Contaminated Channel in Vector Tracking Loop for Position Estimation

Abstract

Vector tracking loop (VTL) has been proved to be more superior than the traditional scalar tracking loop (STL) as its combine signal tracking loop and position-velocity-time (PVT) estimation into one algorithm. In other words, its exploit the coupling between the signal tracking and navigation solution computation. Since its introductions, many variants of VTL have been investigated such as the use of correlator based multipath detector, adaptive VTL as well as conjoint tracking between STL and VTL. All of these variants focus on the quality of the measurement estimation of the tracked signal. Often most, these techniques will show superior overall performance but at the same time, high in complexity which results in longer processing time. Furthermore, all of these studies also agreed on the fact that in VTL, contaminated channels are undesirable and normally excluded from being used for estimation. The objective of this paper is to investigate the effect of the contaminated channel with regards to the position estimation in VTL approach. A simulation-based VTL architecture is used to investigate the effect of the contaminated channel by using a good measurement campaign data that was modelled as an artificial trajectory. Noise will be introduced in selected channels to ascertain the overall impact of the contaminated channel to the overall position estimation of the tracked signal. Understanding these effects to the individual channel allows for better mitigation techniques or algorithm to be introduced that might propose a simpler but efficient way in dealing with the contaminated channel.