Phase-Difference Ambiguity Resolution for a Single-Frequency Signal in the Near-Field Using a Receiver Triplet

Abstract

In this letter we propose a novel method to unambiguously estimate the phase-difference of a single-frequency signal measured between a pair of spatially separated sensors. First, we mathematically prove that, in a noiseless system, the phase between a pair of spatially separated sensors with inter-sensor spacing exceeding half wavelength ( λ 2 ) of the signal of interest, can unambiguously be estimated utilizing a third collinear sensor, provided that the difference of the two smaller inter-sensor spacings does not exceed λ 2 . The performance of the method is characterized by estimating the variance and the probability of failure in noisy cases.

High-Accuracy Reference-Free Ultrasonic Location Estimation

“…Additional redundant receivers, such as in a Uniform Circular Array, can be used to improve performance by averaging. To avoid phase ambiguity problems, either the spacing of the elements must be less than half that wavelength of the maximum carrier frequency or a phase disambiguation algorithm must be applied [32], [33]. The centre of the receiver array defines the origin of the MD's coordinate system.…”

GNSS instantaneous ambiguity resolution and attitude determination exploiting the receiver antenna configuration

“…Applying the approach described in [13] and [14] directly to GNSS carrier-phase data does not give satisfactory success rates. In this paper, the methods are extended to handle the GNSS ambiguity problem and improve the success rate.…”

“…The proposed ambiguity resolution and attitude determination technique is based on the phase-difference ambiguity resolution method that the authors of this paper proposed in [13] and [14]. A key feature of the proposed method is that, unlike existing GNSS ambiguity resolution methods, the proposed method relies completely on exploiting the receiver configuration to facilitate the ambiguity resolution task.…”

“…In [13] and [14], the methods were applied in the acoustic domain. Applying the approach described in [13] and [14] directly to GNSS carrier-phase data does not give satisfactory success rates.…”

“…In Section II, a summary of the ambiguity resolution approach in [13] and [14] is given. In Section III, the application of the methods in [13] and [14] to the GNSS pointing vector estimation problem is discussed and the proposed ambiguity resolution approach is explained. Section IV explains how to exploit the methods developed in Section III for full attitude determination.…”