Multipath cancellation in broadband acoustic local positioning systems

This work proposes a novel method to estimate the Line-of-Sight Time-of-Flights (LOS-TOFs) in a broadband acoustic local positioning system (ALPS) with strong multipath interference. The proposed method is based on the Matching Pursuit channel estimation algorithm that provides a low complexity approximation to the Maximum Likelihood solution for sparse channels. A multichannel version of this algorithm has been implemented to estimate a minimum of three coefficients in the channel responses of a particular ALPS, composed of four beacons that perform the simultaneous emission of BPSK modulated 255-bit Kasami codes. A statistical analysis of performance has been carried out by using a set of test signals synthetically generated to simulate different positions and reflection coefficients of the environment. The results of this analysis show the enhanced capability of the proposed method to estimate the LOS-TOFs under strong multipath interference, with respect to that of a classical system based on correlation + thresholding.