A LabVIEW-Based GPS Receiver Development and Testing Platform with DSP Peripherals: Case study with C6713 DSK

Abstract

The modernization of Global Positioning Systems (GPS) and the availability of more complex signals and modulation schemes boost the development of civil and military applications while the accuracy and coverage of receivers continually improve. Recently, software defined receiver solutions gained attention for flexible multimode operations. For them, developers address algorithmic and hardware accelerators or their hybrids for fast prototyping and testing high performance receivers for various conditions. This paper presents a new fast prototyping concept exploiting digital signal processor (DSP) peripherals and the benefits of the host environment using the National Instruments (NI) LabVIEW platform. With a reasonable distribution of tasks between the host hardware and reconfigurable peripherals, a higher performance is achieved. As a case study, in this paper the Texas Instruments (TI) TMS320C6713 DSP is used along with a Real Time Data Exchange (RTDX) communication link to compare with similar Simulink-based solutions. The proposed testbed GPS signal is created using the NI PXI signal generator and the NI GPS Simulation Toolkit.