The Implementation of High-Precision Ranging Technology Based on Dual Mixer Time Difference

With the development of laser communication technology, the integration of communication and ranging has become a trend in the field of satellite communication and deep-space exploration. Dual mixer time difference (DMTD) has various advantages of precise time resolution and low resource consumption as a method for measuring time difference, which is suitable for ranging in requirement of integration. In this paper, a high-precision ranging technology based on DMTD is proposed and implemented on hardware platform. This technology includes a clock data recovery module which provides synchronizing clock, a DMTD module and the interpolation algorithm which improve measurement accuracy jointly, and the ranging algorithm for the purpose of eliminating the periodic phase ambiguity. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed technology can achieve higher ranging precision compared to the conventional method using tracking loop. The implementation results verifies the feasibility and the good performance of the proposed technology.