Doppler-aided positioning in GNSS receivers - A performance analysis

Abstract

The main objective of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) is to precisely locate a receiver based on the reception of radio-frequency waveforms broadcasted by a set of satellites. Given delayed and Doppler shifted replicas of the known transmitted signals, the most widespread approach consists in a two-step algorithm. First, the delays and Doppler shifts from each satellite are estimated independently, and subsequently the user position and velocity are computed as the solution to a Weighted Least Squares (WLS) problem. This second step conventionally uses only delay measurements to determine the user position, although Doppler is also informative. The goal of this paper is to provide simple and meaningful expressions of the positioning precision. These expressions are analysed with respect to the standard WLS algorithms, exploiting the Doppler information or not. We can then evaluate the performance improvement brought by a joint frequency and delay positioning procedure. Numerical simulations assess that using Doppler information is indeed effective when considering long observation times, and particularly useful in challenging scenarios such as urban canyons (constrained satellite visibility) or near indoor situations (weak signal conditions which need long integration times), thus providing new insights for the design of robust and high-sensitivity receivers.