Abstract
High attenuation, blockage and severe multipath fading in urban environments, under dense canopy or jamming attacks degrade accuracy, continuity, availability and integrity of GNSS services. GNSS/INS integration and antenna array beamforming approaches both provide certain levels of protection against these challenging circumstances in different ways and are studied in the literature; however, their combination of them has received less attention. This research studies different strategies to combine a GNSS antenna array with an inertial navigation system. The focus is on the integration of ultra-tight and tightly coupled GNSS/INS with a distortionless GNSS beamformer. It is shown that a tighter integration of a phase array antenna with INS and GNSS not only has all the benefits of array processing and INS in dealing with challenging environments, but also can provide external information for attitude parameters, and therefore, the overall performance of the integrated system is improved. To verify the applicability of the integrated system and to evaluate its performance, two sets of data have been collected and analyzed.
Highlights
Despite the recent advances in global navigation satellite system (GNSS) technology, jamming, blockage and severe multipath fading can still significantly impair the performance of receivers or completely deny GNSS positions and time services
We briefly review different types of GNSS/inertial navigation system (INS) integration, namely loosely, tightly and ultra-tightly coupled, and two GNSS beamformers, namely blind and distortionless
The overall improvement due to array attitude updates in the integrated system would be higher for lower-grade inertial measurement unit (IMU) with significant errors that need to be corrected over time
Summary
Despite the recent advances in global navigation satellite system (GNSS) technology, jamming, blockage and severe multipath fading can still significantly impair the performance of receivers or completely deny GNSS positions and time services. Due to everincreasing built-up urban environments where most satellite signals are faded or blocked, pure GNSS-based positioning and navigation becomes inaccurate and unreliable. Antenna array processing and GNSS/inertial navigation system (INS) integration are two highly effective approaches to combat these challenging environments. Processing techniques utilizing an array of antennas can effectively defeat various types of GNSS interference and jamming signals regardless of their temporal or spectral characteristics (Fernández-Prades and Arribas 2016; Daneshmand et al 2016; Cuntz et al 2016). An antenna array-based receiver can alleviate multipath effects and increase the C/N0 by steering the main lobe of the array gain pattern toward the satellite signal directions (Seco-Granados et al 2003; Fante and Vaccaro 2000; Daneshmand et al 2013).
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