Multipath time-delay estimation for long data records

We address the problem of multipath time-delay estimation. When the received data is very long compared to the transmitted signal, the data is expected to consist of a large number of paths. Modeling the entire data becomes computationally expensive. We propose a technique to break the data into short segments and model each segment individually without misfitting or truncating any paths at the ends of any segment. By effectively using overlapping segments, the estimates of time-delays are combined to model the entire data record. The method is extended to the case where only basebanded data are available. The proposed technique is demonstrated on an experimental sea-test data.