Definition of a reconfigurable and modular multi-standard navigation receiver

Abstract

The growth of innovative positioning-related services and applications within the wireless mass-market, and the green light for the development and modernization of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) catalyze the research activity in the navigation field both at the system and user levels. In addition, different government institutions are working toward the definition of navigation plans and regulations which will require accurate locations of mobile users in case of emergency (US E-911 law and the European E-112 directive). From the technical standpoint, within every navigation/positioning system which will be available in the near future, the user terminal will play a central role. In fact, if navigation signals from different sources are available, the unique possibility to obtain the best navigation performance from the user perspective will be the employment of enhanced smart receivers able to fuse different data. With this aim, the Software Defined Radio (SDR) technology can be successfully employed for the design of innovative navigation receivers. The main goal of this paper is to present the overall SDR receiver architecture, focusing attention on reconfigurability and flexibility issues which are guaranteed by the use of reprogrammable high-speed hardware (FPGA–Field Programmable Gate Array and DSP–Digital Signal Processor). The direct benefit of such an implementation is the possibility to obtain a deep integration at the raw signal level between GPS and the future Galileo; the interoperability issue among different systems is then solved at the receiver level.