Pseudorange and multipath analysis of positioning with LTE secondary synchronization signals

The ranging precision of the long-term evolution (LTE) secondary synchronization signal (SSS) with noncoherent baseband discriminators is analyzed. The open-loop and closed-loop statistics of the code phase error with the dot-product and early-power-minus-late-power discriminator are derived. The effect of multipath on the code phase error is evaluated numerically. Experimental results demonstrating the efficacy of the derived statistics are presented, in which the total position root-mean squared error (RMSE) with SSS over a 560 m ground vehicle trajectory was reduced by 51%.