Simulation of range code tracking loop for multipath mitigation in NavIC receiver

Abstract

Abstract The Operational Navigation with Indian Constellation (NavIC) comprises seven satellites in the orbit, including three in geostationary orbit (GEO) and four in geosynchronous orbit (GSO). NavIC provides both Standard Positioning Service and Restricted Service, using L5 (1176.45 MHz) and S1 (2492.028 MHz) frequencies, with coverage extending 1500 km around the mainland of India. In an urban canyon, multipath interference severely reduces the precision and reliability of NavIC positioning. Many current multipath mitigation techniques often exhibit high computational requirements or reliance on external assistance. In this paper, a ranging code tracking loop is proposed that can sustain either a late or early branch in contrast to the Narrow-Spacing (NS) correlation technique for mitigating multipath for NavIC receiver. The design of proposed code tracking loop is based on steepest descent algorithm. The findings demonstrate that, in terms of calculation time and code multipath mitigation, the suggested technique performs better than both Multipath Estimated Delay Locked Loop (MEDL) and NS correlation. The proposed method produces less than 0.016 chips for the tracking error Standard Deviation (STD). In addition, the recommended method takes 24 % less computation time.