A generalized equalization-based algorithm for multipath time delay estimation

Multipath propagation is common in sonar and radar, and it has made the task of time delay estimation much more difficult. In this paper, an adaptive algorithm based on a generalized equalization approach is proposed which provides spontaneous measurements of the difference in arrival times of a signal received at two separated sensors as well as the multipath channel characteristics. The method attempts to minimize a multimodal cost function whose global minimum gives the exact values of the time delay and multipath parameters. A simple initialization scheme is employed and the stochastic gradient descent method is used for descending toward the minimum of the performance surface. The performance of the proposed algorithm is analysed and simulation results are given to illustrate that the method is capable of estimating the system parameters accurately for different number of multipaths.