Assessment of Multipath in Aeronautical Environments

In the last years the usage of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) systems for aviation was a quickly growing field. In this context the problem of multipath reception becomes crucial as aviation demands high accuracy navigation based upon GNSS throughout all phases of flight and in particular with strong requirements for the approach and landing phase. To address this issue, simulations have been carried out on the basis of the satellite-to-aircraft navigation channel model developed by DLR in 2003, which was approved in February 2007 as major revision to recommendation ITU 682-1. A theoretical analysis based on the ground echo statistics is also performed, resulting in an approximation of the pseudo-range error distributions. This analysis gives an insight into the nature of the multipath threat of the aeronautical channel and confirms the observations made from the simulated error distributions