Abstract
This article provides a comparative performance analysis of different acquisition and tracking methods of GPS L1 C/A and GPS L5 signals testing their robustness to the presence of scintillations in the propagation environment. This article compares the different acquisition methods in terms of probabilities of detection/false alarm, peak-to-noise floor ratios for the acquired signal and execution time, assessing the performance loss in the presence of scintillations. Moreover, robust tracking architectures that are optimized to operate in a harsh ionospheric environment have been employed. The performance of the carrier tracking methods, namely, traditional phase-locked loop (PLL) and Kalman filter based-PLL, have been compared in terms of the standard deviation of Doppler estimation, phase error, phase lock indicator (PLI), and phase jitter. The article is based on real global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) signals affected by significant phase and amplitude scintillation effects, collected at the South African Antarctic research base (SANAE IV) and Brazilian Centro de Radioastronomia e Astrofisica Mackenzie (CRAAM) monitoring stations. Performance is assessed exploiting a fully software GNSS receiver, which implements the different architectures. The comparative analysis allows to choose the best setting of the acquisition and tracking parameters, in order to allow the operation of signal acquisition and tracking at a required performance level under scintillation conditions.
Highlights
The third civilian global positioning system (GPS) signal L5 is being broadcast by 12 Block-IIF GPS satellites [1]
The scintillation is stronger in GPS L5 signal than GPS L1 C/A signal as it can be seen in Figs. 2(a) and (b) and 3(a) and (b)
In the analysis shown in the figures, the phase-locked loop (PLL) design parameters Bn = 10 Hz, T = 10 ms, and T = 20 ms are selected for GPS L5 and GPS L1 C/A signals, respectively
Summary
The third civilian global positioning system (GPS) signal L5 is being broadcast by 12 Block-IIF GPS satellites [1]. The new L5 signal, as well as any GNSS signal, undergoes severe propagation effects such as phase shifts, group delays, and amplitude variations while propagating through the ionosphere [3]. Ionospheric irregularities affect the GNSS signals in two ways, namely, refraction and diffraction, and both of them are caused by the group delay and phase advance of GNSS signals [4]. Both the aforementioned effects that are usually denoted as scintillation effects cause fluctuations in the signal amplitude and phase of the received signals. Large-scale variations in both signal power and phase with the increased measurement noise level severely degrade the GNSS receiver performance by preventing the receiver from correctly acquiring the GNSS signals or causing loss-of-lock when the signals are tracked
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