Effective Preprocessing Transformation with Rake Reception for Shift Invariant TOA Estimation of Chirp Signals in Multipath Environments

This paper proposes an effective preprocessing transformation with rake reception for the shift invariant time-of-arrival (TOA) estimation of the chirp signal in multipath channels. For the shift invariant TOA estimation, the received chirp must be transformed into sinusoidal form. There are two types of preprocessing transformations: de-chirping and the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) with de-convolution. By applying the proposed transformation based on multiple references, performance improvement for the TOA estimation can be achieved in multipath channels. The effectiveness of the proposed preprocessing transformation is analyzed and verified through Monte Carlo simulations in multipath channels.