Carrier Phase Ranging with DTMB Signals for Urban Pedestrian Localization and GNSS Aiding

Abstract

China developed its Digital Television (DTV) standard in 2006, known as Digital Television Terrestrial Multimedia Broadcasting (DTMB), which employs time-domain synchronous orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (TDS-OFDM) as the modulation method. In contrast to Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSSs), DTV signals have higher transmitting power, wider coverage, larger bandwidth, and fixed transmitter location. This paper explores the positioning performance of DTMB signals, and the potential to improve GNSS positioning accuracy in urban environments. Specifically, a solution is proposed, and a software-defined radio receiver is developed for wireless localization. Without changing the current signal structure, the pseudorandom noise (PN) sequences in the signal are used for signal acquisition and carrier phase ranging. The carrier phase of the first arrived path is extracted by the least squares matching pursuit method. Both static and dynamic field tests were conducted to verify the proposed ranging and positioning method. Centimeter-level ranging accuracy was achieved in the static scenario, while meter-level ranging accuracy was achieved in the dynamic scenario. As one possible application, the proposed ranging method was combined with GPS pseudorange measurements to achieve higher accuracy position results in an urban pedestrian scenario, especially when there is only a limited number of visible satellites.