Improvement of Carrier Phase Tracking Based on a Joint Vector Architecture

Carrier phase measurements are essential to high precision positioning. Usually, the carrier phase measurements are generated from the phase lock loop in a conventional Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) receiver. However there is a dilemma problem to the design of the loop parameters in a conventional tracking loop. To address this problem and improve the carrier phase tracking sensitivity, a carrier phase tracking method based on a joint vector architecture is proposed. The joint vector architecture contains a common loop based on extended Kalman filter to track the common dynamics of the different channels and the individual loops for each channel to track the satellite specific dynamics. The transfer function model of the proposed architecture is derived. The proposed method and the conventional scalar carrier phase tracking are tested with a high quality simulator. The test results indicate that carrier phase measurements of satellites start to show cycle slips using the proposed method when carrier noise ratio is equal to and below 15 dB-Hz instead of 21 dB-Hz with using the conventional phase tracking loop. Since the joint vector based tracking loops jointly process the signals of all available satellites, the potential interchannel influence between different satellites is also investigated.