Positioning with Chinese DTMB Signal under Complex Urban Environments

Abstract. With the development of the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS), the GNSS can provide a wide-area positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) service. However, the GNSS can not work well in some environments, such as GNSS jamming environments and GNSS denied environments. Thus, it is necessary to develop a non-GNSS-based PNT solution. Chinese digital multimedia broadcast (DTMB) signal presents a potential opportunity for wireless localization. In this paper, we proposed a software-defined radio (SDR) receiver based on the DTMB signal for positioning. The key innovations of the proposed SDR receiver are as follows: 1) proposing a fusion filter to fuse the information from the frequency-locked loop (FLL), and phase-locked loop (PLL) to improve the performance of the PLL under high dynamical environments; 2) utilizing the carrier-to-noise radio (C/N0) to remove the range observation influenced by heavy non-line of sight (NLOS) environment and utilizing the usable range observations for positioning. To evaluate the performance of the designed DTMB receiver, a series of field experiments are conducted. The pedestrian experiment results show that the 1 − σ ranging error from the carrier phase is about 0.94m. The on-vehicle experiment results show that the 1 − σ positioning error in the eastward is about 9.07m, and the 1 − σ positioning error in the northward is about 7.74m. This means the designed DTMB receiver can provide sub-meter ranging results under pedestrian environments, and the proposed DTMB receiver is able to provide meter-level positioning results under complex urban environments. Related research shows that the signal point position method (SPP) of GNSS also provides meter-level positioning results under complex urban environments. Thus, the proposed DTMB receiver can be utilized as a non-GNSS-based PNT solution.