ACTIVE HIGH-RESOLUTION TIME-DELAY ESTIMATION FOR LARGE BT SIGNALS

This paper is concerned with the active identification of a multipath propagation channel. The channel is described by a parametric model and we estimate the set of unknown parameters. We achieve time delay estimation (TDE) by using high resolution methods (HRM) on signals with a large time-bandwidth product. We describe two different high resolution time delay estimation (HRTDE) methods: a temporal method and a frequency method. The performance gain of these methods is shown to be about four times better in comparison with the "classical" TD resolution methods. The frequency HRTDE method is applied to real data obtained from an ocean acoustic experiment. Although classic methods cannot distinguish close signal components, our method yields estimates of the delay differences and the attenuation associated with each propagation path.