Multipath Mitigation via Synthetic Aperture Beamforming for Indoor and Deep Urban Navigation

A synthetic aperture navigation (SAN) system that exploits downlink cellular long-term evolution (LTE) signals and an inertial measurement unit (IMU) is developed. The system is suitable for multipath-rich environments, such as indoors and deep urban canyons. The proposed SAN system mitigates multipath via a spatial discriminator, which utilizes the motion of a single antenna element to synthesize a geometrically separated antenna array from time-separated snapshots, alleviating the need for a physical antenna array. Signals from the synthesized antenna array are used to beamform towards the line-of-sight (LOS) LTE direction, while suppressing multipath components. Different stages of the beamforming process are discussed, and the computational complexity of the proposed system is analyzed. To deal with the unknown clock biases of the LTE eNodeBs, two navigation frameworks are developed: (1) base/rover and (2) standalone rover. The proposed SAN system is validated experimentally, and the navigation solutions achieved from the following systems are compared: (i) IMU only, (ii) LTE only, (iii) feedforward LTE-SAN, (iv) feedback LTE-SAN, (v) LTE-IMU, and (vi) feedback LTE-SAN-IMU. In the performed experiment, a pedestrian-mounted receiver navigated indoors for 109 m in 50 seconds, while receiving LTE signals from 5 LTE eNodeBs. The proposed LTE-SAN-IMU system exhibited a two-dimensional position root mean-squared error (RMSE) of 1.44 m with a standard deviation of 1.85 m.