Modified Ziv-Zakai bound for Time-Of-Arrival estimation of GNSS Signal-In-Space

Signal Time-Of-Arrival (TOA) estimation accuracy is fundamental to the functioning of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSSs). This work investigates a variant of the Ziv-Zakai bound (ZZB) named modified ZZB (MZZB) as a theoretical performance limit in TOA estimation, to overcome the heavy computational effort caused by the presence of nuisance parameters (carrier amplitude/phase, channel coefficients). (M)ZZB is adopted to analyze the theoretical performance of signal delay estimators in the different phases of acquisition and tracking, and numerical results are shown for the main GNSS standard signal formats: BPSK and (filtered) Binary Offset Carriers (BOC) modulations in Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) channel.