Analysis of early late phase in single-and dual-frequency GPS receivers for multipath detection

Abstract

Much of the research into multipath detection and mitigation has not considered the carrier phase delay between the line of sight (LOS) and reflected signals. A new variable referred to as early late phase (ELP) has recently been proposed to exploit this phase difference. It has been found that in a receiver tracking the L1 GPS signal, the probability of detecting multipath is lower when the carrier phase difference between the LOS and a reflected signal is an integer multiple of π. Since the pseudorange error caused by the multipath’s presence is the highest in this case, we propose to exploit the coexistence of another GPS civilian signal, the L2C. We present an analysis of ELP for the L1 and L2C signals, and a combination of both, for detecting multipath. The multipath detection performance has been compared using probabilities of false alarm and detection. An ideal algorithm should have lower probability of false alarm and higher probability of detection. However, it has been found that using dual-frequency ELP increases both probabilities. Thus, receiver operator characteristics (ROC) curves, and the area under the ROC curves, have been used for effective comparison. It has been found that the L2C signal individually gives worse performance than L1 because of its weaker signal strength. However, the combination of L1 and L2C gives the best overall performance, and thus it can be claimed that ELP using dual-frequency receivers is a more effective approach for detecting multipath.