An Efficient Two-Fold Marginalized Bayesian Filter for Multipath Estimation in Satellite Navigation Receivers

Multipath is today still one of the most critical problems in satellite navigation, in particular in urban environments, where the received navigation signals can be affected by blockage, shadowing, and multipath reception. Latest multipath mitigation algorithms are based on the concept of sequential Bayesian estimation and improve the receiver performance by exploiting the temporal constraints of the channel dynamics. In this paper, we specifically address the problem of estimating and adjusting the number of multipath replicas that is considered by the receiver algorithm. An efficient implementation via a two-fold marginalized Bayesian filter is presented, in which a particle filter, grid-based filters, and Kalman filters are suitably combined in order to mitigate the multipath channel by efficiently estimating its time-variant parameters in a track-before-detect fashion. Results based on an experimentally derived set of channel data corresponding to a typical urban propagation environment are used to confirm the benefit of our novel approach.