A BDS-3 B1C/B2a dual-frequency joint tracking architecture based on adaptive Kalman filter and extended integration time

Abstract

With the development of the third-generation BeiDou navigation satellite system (BDS-3), the availability of new civil B1C and B2a signals along with existing B1I and B3I signals will greatly benefit the design of BeiDou multi-frequency receivers. For instance, BDS-3 can provide signal observations at multiple frequencies to form flexible design strategies of advanced receiver baseband signal and a linear combination of observations used for different purposes. The B1C/B2a receivers have been proposed recently which, however, are limited by the integration time to improve the tracking sensitivity further. Also, the signal observations and characteristics of the dual-frequency tracking architecture have not been fully explored, which can be further designed to get mutual benefits and reach an optimal tracking performance. In order to improve the tracking performance, especially in challenging environments such as in the presence of a weak signal and selective frequency signal attenuation, a B1C/B2a joint tracking architecture for BDS-3 dual-frequency receivers is proposed based on an adaptive Kalman filter and an extended integration time. The experimental results show that compared to the modified traditional tracking architectures, the proposed joint tracking architecture can improve the receiver’s tracking sensitivity up to 3.29 dB and achieve an optimal availability, accuracy and robustness performance in both tracking and navigation solutions.