A Fast Parallel GPS Acquisition Algorithm Based on Hybrid GPU and Multi-core CPU

Abstract

Over the last decade, to improve the necessary accuracy and reliability of the existing global positioning system (GPS), incorporation with new constellations such as European Galileo navigation system and the update of the Russian Global Navigation Satellite System (GLONASS) attract a lot of attentions. In software integrations, the most important challenge is the calculation load which should be solved using suitable techniques. The parallel nature of this application causes graphic processing unit (GPU) and multi-core platform as a low cost and effective solution for the implementation of a software receiver. In this paper, in order to accelerate GPS acquisition, a hybrid parallel algorithm based on GPU and multi-core CPU is designed and implemented on two systems with GT630 and GT630M GPU. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is 2.2 times faster than sequential algorithm in one-core implementation and 4 times faster in quad core. On the other hand, the proposed parallel acquisition algorithm on GPU-based 2-core is 15% faster than acquisition on 4-core without GPU, which shows the effective role of GPU in parallelism of this application.