Vector antenna and information geometry for time-delay estimation under alteration – VEGETA

Various phenomena impact signals between their emission and their reception. Some of them might carry useful information, such as the propagation delay, related to the range between emitter and receiver, or the Doppler shift, related to their relative velocities. For instance, this information is used in Radar systems or Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) to retrieve one’s position and speed. Under nominal conditions, it is possible to isolate a single emitter from the others, leading to an observed signal composed of the signal of interest (SoI): an attenuated, delayed, and shifted in frequency version of the emitted signal, along with white Gaussian noise. When spurious signals arrive at the antenna with the SoI, such as replicas of the original signal (multipath, spoofing) or interferences (pulsed, jamming), the corresponding estimation problem becomes more challenging.
Some mitigation techniques resort to array processing, where the spatial sampling is also coupled with the knowledge of the satellite position and expected signal waveform. However, in some applications, the system volume might be constrained, and the use of an antenna array is not possible. To exploit polarization diversity, vector antennas provide six outputs corresponding to electric and magnetic field components. Not only this technology allows more compact systems, but the polarization diversity also allows to resolve sources impinging from the same directions, providing better resolution.
This project aims at tackling alterations in ranging signals in a wide sense: both uncorrelated (jamming) and correlated (multipath, spoofing) interferences will be considered. The objectives are:
1-Use of geometric information to improve estimation in identified scenarios
2-Apply recent array processing estimation methods to vector antennas
3-Application of the selected approaches to real data