Evaluation and reduction of multipath-induced bias on GPS time-of-arrival

New expressions are presented for the multipath-induced pseudorange error (i.e. bias) and variance introduced by multipath onto the time-of-arrival estimate obtained using a noncoherent early-late gate discriminator. The results include the effect of front-end bandwidth and early-late gate spacing. We also investigate a blind method for cancelling the multipath, in order to improve the time-of-arrival estimate. Our approach uses early-late gate processing on an objective function derived from an adaptive finite impulse response (FIR) filter that attempts to match the crosscorrelation of the received signal with a multipath-free replica of the desired crosscorrelation. This method performs reasonably well, and decreases the multipath-induced pseudorange error by approximately a factor of 2, even in very stressing multipath environments.