Joint Time-of-Arrival and Carrier-Phase Measurement and Tracking for Enhanced Loran Signals in Complex Interference...

To address carrier-phase loss of lock and long-term drift in frequency-offset estimation that may arise from time-of-arrival (TOA) measurements in enhanced Loran (eLoran) timing receivers under low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and moderate-to-high dynamics, this paper proposes a joint TOA and carrier-phase measurement and tracking method. First, transmitter identification and group repetition interval (GRI) lock are achieved by exploiting the periodic repetition of pulse groups, and epoch folding is applied to enhance effective SNR. Then, a sub-sample TOA observation is constructed via a three-stage progressive refinement procedure: energy-matching coarse estimation, coherent cross-correlation, and parabolic peak interpolation. In parallel, baseband phase observations are obtained through coherent downconversion and accumulation. A unified state-space model incorporating TOA bias, TOA drift rate, baseband phase, and frequency offset is further established to enable joint Kalman filtering of TOA and phase. Moreover, an innovation-likelihood-weighted parallel multiple-model filter combined with measurement-noise covariance inflation is introduced to suppress outlier observations. Simulations show that the TOA estimate converges within about 1 s while maintaining phase continuity and stable frequency-offset estimation, and that the proposed method achieves superior overall robustness and long-term stability compared with a conventional Costas loop.