Direct Position Estimation of a Mobile Receiver in Multipath Environments via Adaptive Beamforming

The paper presents a novel direct position estimation approach to localize a mobile receiver in multipath environments, where the different paths are coherent hence standard AOA estimation methods fail. The proposed algorithm combines the angular information from signals transmitted by a set of static transmitters with the velocity information obtained from the onboard kinematic sensors. To this aim, the received signals are first decorrelated through spatial smoothing, then an adaptive beamforming strategy is applied to mitigate the detrimental effects of multipath propagation. Simulation results in a realistic multipath environment demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can achieve satisfactory localization performance, outperforming existing AOA-based (indirect) position estimation approaches.