Tracking performance of GPS receivers with more than one multipath

Christophe Macabiau (1) , Benoit Roturier (1) , Abdelahad Benhallam (1)

1 ENAC - Ecole Nationale de l'Aviation Civile

A wide majority of studies on the effect of multipath focused on the analysis of the code and phase tracking errors when only two rays enter the tracking loops, namely the direct ray plus one diffracted ray. Unfortunately, this condition does not correspond to the most frequent situations, where the received signal can be the discrete sum of several powerful replicas of the direct signal. The aim of this paper is to present the theoretical results of a study that identifies the performance of the GPS receivers in the case where more than two powerful rays enter the tracking loops. The theoretical analysis shows that in the case of continuous tracking, if the summed amplitudes of the reflected signals is lower than the amplitude of the direct signal, the code error envelope of the composite signal can be approximated as the sum of the code error envelope for each individual ray, except in its transition zones. The distortion in these zones is negligible for the narrow correlator DLLs and the DLLs controlled by linear combinations of correlation values.

Domaines: Traitement du signal et de l'image [eess.SP]; Traitement du signal et de l'image [eess.SP]

Christophe Macabiau, Benoit Roturier, Abdelahad Benhallam. Tracking performance of GPS receivers with more than one multipath. GNSS 1999, 3rd European symposium on GNSS, Oct 1999, Genoa, Italy. ⟨hal-01021685⟩