Mitigating Multipath Bias Using a Dual-Polarization Antenna: Theoretical Performance, Algorithm Design, and Simulation

It is well known that multipath effect remains a dominant error source that affects the positioning accuracy of Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) receivers. Significant efforts have been made by researchers and receiver manufacturers to mitigate multipath error in the past decades. Recently, a multipath mitigation technique using dual-polarization antennas has become a research hotspot for it provides another degree of freedom to distinguish the line-of-sight (LOS) signal from the LOS and multipath composite signal without extensively increasing the complexity of the receiver. Numbers of multipath mitigation techniques using dual-polarization antennas have been proposed and all of them report performance improvement over the single-polarization methods. However, due to the unpredictability of multipath, multipath mitigation techniques based on dual-polarization are not always effective while few studies discuss the condition under which the multipath mitigation using a dual-polarization antenna can outperform that using a single-polarization antenna, which is a fundamental question for dual-polarization multipath mitigation (DPMM) and the design of multipath mitigation algorithms. In this paper we analyze the characteristics of the signal received by a dual-polarization antenna and use the maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) to assess the theoretical performance of DPMM in different received signal cases. Based on the assessment we answer this fundamental question and find the dual-polarization antenna's capability in mitigating short delay multipath-the most challenging one among all types of multipath for the majority of the multipath mitigation techniques. Considering these effective conditions, we propose a dual-polarization sequential iterative maximum likelihood estimation (DP-SIMLE) algorithm for DPMM. The simulation results verify our theory and show superior performance of the proposed DP-SIMLE algorithm over the traditional one using only an RHCP antenna.