Dual-Polarization Beamforming Techniques for Multipath Mitigation in GNSS Handheld Receivers

Abstract

This paper analyses the impact of exploiting polarization diversity for multipath mitigation in GNSS handheld receivers. While the use of array processing techniques has been widely studied in the field of multipath mitigation, few studies consider receivers equipped with very small antenna arrays, which is the case of handheld devices. When working with few antennas some performance limitations appear due to the small size of the array, so these must be counteracted by exploiting additional information available at the receiver. One possible solution is to make use of polarization diversity, taking advantage of the fact that in most multipath scenarios, reflected replicas tend to have a different polarization from that of the desired signal. Therefore, this paper evaluates the performance of some array processing techniques when combined with dual-polarized antennas, showing that the small size of the array can be effectively counteracted by exploiting polarization diversity when combating multipath.