The effects of using variable lengths for degraded signal acquisition in GPS receivers

The signal acquisition in GPS receivers is the first and very crucial process that may affect the overall performance of a navigation receiver. Acquisition program initiates a searching operation on received navigation signals to detect and identify the visible satellites. However, signal acquisition becomes a very challenging task in a degraded environment (i.e, dense urban) and the receiver may not be able to detect the satellites present in radio-vicinity, thus cannot estimate an accurate position solution. In such environments, satellite signals are attenuated and fluctuated due to fading introduced by Multipath and NLOS reception. To perform signal acquisition in such degraded environments, larger data accumulation can be effective in enhancing SNR, which tradeoff huge computational load, prolonged acquisition time and high cost of receiver. This paper highlights the effects of fading on satellite signal acquisition in GPS receiver through variable data lengths and SNR comparison, and then develops a statistical relationship between satellite visibility and SNR. Furthermore it also analyzes/investigates the tradeoff between computation load and signal data length.

Complexity and Limitations of GNSS Signal Reception in Highly Obstructed Enviroments

Multipath (MP) and/or Non Line-Of-Sight (NLOS) reception remains a potential vulnerability to satellite-based positioning and navigation systems in high multipath environments, such as an urban canyon. In such an environment, satellite signals are reflected, scattered or faded, and sometimes completely blocked by roofs and walls of high-rise buildings, fly-over bridges, complex road structures, etc. making positioning and navigation information inaccurate, unreliable, and largely unavailable. The magnitude of the positioning error depends on the satellite visibility, geometric distribution of satellites in the sky, and received signal quality and characteristics. The quality of the received signal (i.e. its statistical characteristics) can significantly vary in different environments and these variations can reflect in signal strength or power, range measurements (i.e. path delay and phase difference), and frequency, all of which distort the correlation curve between the received signal and receiver-generated replicas, resulting in range errors of tens of meters. Therefore, in order to meet stringent requirements defined for the Standard Positioning Service (SPS), the characterization of distortions that could significantly affect a Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) signal is essentially important. The scope of this paper is to detect possible imperfections/deviations in the GNSS signal characteristics that can occur due to MP or NLOS reception and analyze its effects. For this purpose, analysis of fading patterns in received signal strength (i.e. Carrier-to-Noise Ratio and strength fluctuations) is carried out in both clear LOS and high MP environment and then its impact on satellite lock state (i.e. tracking) is assessed. Furthermore, phase fluctuations and range residuals are computed to analyze the effects of path delays. The results show that significant variations can occur in GNSS signal characteristics in the MP environment that may result in loss of lock event and inaccurate/faulty range measurements.

Height Aiding, C/N0 Weighting and Consistency Checking for GNSS NLOS and Multipath Mitigation in Urban Areas

Multiple global navigation satellite system (GNSS) constellations can dramatically improve the signal availability in dense urban environments. However, accuracy remains a challenge because buildings block, reflect and diffract the signals. This paper investigates three different techniques for mitigating the impact of non-line-of-sight (NLOS) reception and multipath interference on position accuracy without using additional hardware, testing them using data collected at multiple sites in central London. Aiding the position solution using a terrain height database was found to have the biggest impact, improving the horizontal accuracy by 35% and the vertical accuracy by a factor of 4. An 8% improvement in horizontal accuracy was also obtained from weighting the GNSS measurements in the position solution according to the carrier-power-to-noise-density ratio (C/N0). Consistency checking using a conventional sequential elimination technique was found to degrade horizontal positioning performance by 60% because it often eliminated the wrong measurements in cases when multiple signals were affected by NLOS reception or strong multipath interference. A new consistency checking method that compares subsets of measurements performed better, but was still equally likely to improve or degrade the accuracy. This was partly because removing a poor measurement can result in adverse signal geometry, degrading the position accuracy. Based on this, several ways of improving the reliability of consistency checking are proposed.