6. Pulse Delay Estimation via Direct Use of TOAs

An important point regarding the pulse delay estimation techniques introduced in Chap. 5 is that they need to employ the epoch folding procedure which needs the exact knowledge of the spacecraft velocities. Furthermore, it was shown that the proposed epoch folding-based estimators are not asymptotically efficient. To address these problems, we propose another method in this chapter. This approach is based on direct use of the measured TOA sets, \(\{{t}_{i}^{(1)}\}_{i=1}^{{M}_{1}}\) and \(\{{t}_{i}^{(2)}\}_{i=1}^{{M}_{2}}\). Because the measured TOAs are being used directly, it is not necessary for the estimators to have access to the velocity data. Nonetheless, the effect of imprecise velocity data on the performance of the pulse delay estimator is studied. Computational complexity study is also performed.