Adaptive beamforming and phase bias compensation for GNSS receiver

Abstract

Adaptive antenna arrays have been used to mitigate the interference on global navigation satellite system (GNSS) receivers. The performance of interference mitigation depends on the beamforming algorithms adopted by the antenna array. However, the adaptive beamforming will change the array pattern in realtime, which has the potential to introduce phase center biases into the antenna array. For precise applications, these phase biases must be mitigated or compensated because they will bring errors in code phase and carrier phase measurements. A novel adaptive beamforming algorithm is proposed firstly, then the phase bias induced by the proposed algorithm is estimated, and finally a compensation strategy is addressed. Simulations demonstrate that the proposed beamforming algorithm suppresses effectively the strong interference and improves significantly the capturing performance of GNSS signals. Simultaneously, the bias compensation method avoids the loss of the carrier phase lock and reduces the phase measurement errors for GNSS receivers.