Design and Silicon Area Optimization of Time-Domain GNSS Receiver Baseband Architectures

The use of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSSs) in a wide range of portable devices has exploded in the recent years. Demands for a lower cost while expecting longer battery life and better performance are constantly increasing. The general GNSS receiver operation and algorithms are already well studied in the literature, but the hardware architectures and designs have not been discussed in detail.This thesis introduces a high level gate count estimation method that provides good accuracy without requiring the hardware being fully specified. It is based on developing hierarchical models, which are parameterizable, while requiring minimal amount of information about the silicon technology used for the implementation. The average accuracy has been shown to be 4%.Three time-domain, real-time GNSS receiver baseband architectures are described with a discussion about various optimization methods for efficient implementation: the correlator, the matched filter, and the group correlator, which is a new architecture combining some of the features of the two first ones.Four use cases are defined for different GNSS operating modes: Acquisition, tracking, assisted GNSS, and the combination of the first three modes. A comparison is made for receiver basebands including all necessary blocks for full functionality to find out which of the three architectures provides the most silicon area efficient implementation.It is shown that the correlator offers good flexibility, but yields the highest silicon area for acquisition use cases. The matched filter is best suited for the acquisition, but has large overhead when it comes to tracking the signals. The group correlator offers a reasonably good flexibility and area efficiency in all use cases.The main contributions of the thesis are: Development of domain specific optimizations for GNSS receivers and an accurate gate count estimation method, which are applied for a quantitative comparison of different GNSS receiver architectures. The results show that no single architecture excels in all cases, and the best choice depends on the actual use case

Low power, reduced complexity filtering and improved tracking accuracy for GNSS

This thesis addresses the power consumption problems resulting from the advent of multiple GNSS satellite systems which create the need for receivers supporting multi-frequency, multi-constellation GNSS systems. Such a multi-mode receiver requires a substantial amount of signal processing power which translates to increased hardware complexity and higher power dissipation which reduces the battery life of a mobile platform. During the course of the work undertaken, a power analysis tool was developed in order to be able to estimate the hardware utilisation as well as the power consumption of a digital system. By using the power estimation tool developed, it was established that most of the power was dissipated after the Analog to Digital Converter (ADC)by the filters associated with the decimation process. The power dissipation and the hardware complexity of the decimator can be reduced substantially by using a minimum-phase Infinite Impulse Response (IIR) filter. For Global Positioning System (GPS) civilian signals, the use of IIR filters does not deleteriously affect the positional accuracy. However, in the case where an IIR filter was deployed in a GLObalnaya NAvigatsionnaya Sputnikovaya Sistema (GLONASS) receiver, the pseudorange measurements of the receiver varied by up to 200 metres. The work undertaken proposes various methods that overcomes the pseudorange measurement variation and reports on the results that are on par with linear-phase Finite Impulse Response (FIR) filters. The work also proposes a modified tracking loop that is capable of tracking very low Doppler frequencies without decreasing the tracking performance

Air Force Institute of Technology Research Report 2015

This report summarizes the research activities of the Air Force Institute of Technology’s Graduate School of Engineering and Management. It describes research interests and faculty expertise; lists student theses/dissertations; identifies research sponsors and contributions; and outlines the procedures for contacting the school. Included in the report are: faculty publications, conference presentations, consultations, and funded research projects. Research was conducted in the areas of Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Electro-Optics, Computer Engineering and Computer Science, Systems Engineering and Management, Operational Sciences, Mathematics, Statistics and Engineering Physics

Air Force Institute of Technology Research Report 2015

This report summarizes the research activities of the Air Force Institute of Technology’s Graduate School of Engineering and Management. It describes research interests and faculty expertise; lists student theses/dissertations; identifies research sponsors and contributions; and outlines the procedures for contacting the school. Included in the report are: faculty publications, conference presentations, consultations, and funded research projects. Research was conducted in the areas of Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Electro-Optics, Computer Engineering and Computer Science, Systems Engineering and Management, Operational Sciences, Mathematics, Statistics and Engineering Physics

Air Force Institute of Technology Research Report 2016

This Research Report presents the FY16 research statistics and contributions of the Graduate School of Engineering and Management (EN) at AFIT. AFIT research interests and faculty expertise cover a broad spectrum of technical areas related to USAF needs, as reflected by the range of topics addressed in the faculty and student publications listed in this report. In most cases, the research work reported herein is directly sponsored by one or more USAF or DOD agencies. AFIT welcomes the opportunity to conduct research on additional topics of interest to the USAF, DOD, and other federal organizations when adequate manpower and financial resources are available and/or provided by a sponsor. In addition, AFIT provides research collaboration and technology transfer benefits to the public through Cooperative Research and Development Agreements (CRADAs)

Narrowband interference rejection studies for Galileo signals via Simulink

Four Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) are scheduled to be fully operational orbiting the Earth in the coming years. A considerably high number of signals, coming from each of the satellites that will constitute those constellations, will share the radio electric spectrum. Aeronautical Radio Navigation Systems (ARNS) share the E5 Galileo band. Examples of ARNS are Distance Measuring Equipment (DME) and Tactical Air Navigation system (TACAN). It should also be mentioned that electronic attacks (jamming or spoofing) have always been a latent threat for satellite services. All of this are important interference sources which can partially or completely disable a GNSS system. These interferences must be, and are currently being studied together with interference mitigation methods. The aim of the work presented in this thesis is to study the narrowband interference effects in Galileo E5 band and to assess three mitigation techniques against two types of narrowband interferences, Continuous Wave Interference (CWI) and DME signals. Cancellation techniques can be classified into two major groups: time-domain approaches and frequency-domain approaches. Methods that combine time and frequency together are also given in the literature (e.g. cyclostationarity-based methods) but their implementations are very costly with high sampling rates as those used for example in Galileo E5 signals. The mitigation techniques that are addressed in this thesis are zeroing, dynamic notch filtering and blanking pulse methods. All of them can be understood as filtering techniques that remove any signal above a certain threshold. This thesis shows that zeroing is more suitable for CWI and blanking is better against DME signals. These techniques have been developed within a Matlab-Simulink based simulator initiated in 2007 at Tampere University of Technology. The implemented simulator could be a great help tool for future research and development projects

Test bench solutions for advanced GNSS receivers : implementation, automation, and application

Considerable study has been devoted to the implementation of GNSS receivers for diverse applications, and to finding solutions to some of the non-idealities associated with such receivers. However, not much research is devoted to innovations in their performance evaluation, even though this is an integral step in the overall implementation process. This research work attempts to address this issue through three different perspectives: by focusing on innovation in the testing procedures and test-bench implementation, its automation and its application to advanced multi-frequency, multi-constellation GPS and Galileo receivers. Majority of this research was conducted within the GREAT, GRAMMAR, and FUGAT projects funded by EU FP6/FP7 and TEKES respectively, during which the author was responsible for designing test-scenarios and performing validations of the implemented receiver solution. The first part of the research is devoted to the study and design of sources of test signals for an advanced GNSS receiver test-bench. An in-depth background literature study was conducted on software-based GNSS signal simulators to trace their evolution over the past two decades. Keeping their special features and limitations in view, recommendations have been made on the optimum architecture and essential features within such simulators for testing of advanced receivers. This resulted in the implementation of an experimental software-based simulator capable of producing GPS L1 and Galileo E1 signals at intermediate frequency. Another solution investigated was a GNSS Sampled Data Generator (SDG) based on wideband sampling. This included designing the entire radio front-end operating on the bandpass-sampling principle. The low noise amplifier designed as part of this SDG has been implemented on a printed circuit board. Phase noise (PN) from the radio front-end’s local frequency generator (LFG) is a source of error that has hitherto not been included in any GNSS signal simulator. Furthermore, the characterization of the baseband tracking loops in presence of this phase noise has not yet been included in the typical receiver test scenarios. The second part of this research attempts to create mathematical models representing the LFG’s phase noise contribution, first for a free running oscillator and later for a complete phase-locked loop (PLL). The effect of such phase noise was studied on the baseband correlation performance of GPS and Galileo receivers. The results helped to demonstrate a direct relation between the PN and the baseband tracking performance, thus helping to define guidelines for radio front-end PLL circuit design in order to maintain a minimum baseband tracking performance within the GNSS receiver. The final part of this research work focusses on describing the automated test-bench developed at Tampere University of Technology (TUT) for analyzing the overall performance of multi-frequency multi-constellation GNSS receivers. The proposed testbench includes a data capture tool to extract internal process information, and the overall controlling software, called automated performance evaluation tool, that is able to communicate between all modules for hands-free, one-button-click testing of GNSS receivers. Furthermore, these tools have been applied for the single frequency GPS L1 performance testing of the TUTGNSS receiver, with recommendations on how they can be adapted to testing of advanced multi-frequency, multi-constellation receivers

Air Force Institute of Technology Research Report 2017

This Research Report presents the FY18 research statistics and contributions of the Graduate School of Engineering and Management (EN) at AFIT. AFIT research interests and faculty expertise cover a broad spectrum of technical areas related to USAF needs, as reflected by the range of topics addressed in the faculty and student publications listed in this report. In most cases, the research work reported herein is directly sponsored by one or more USAF or DOD agencies. AFIT welcomes the opportunity to conduct research on additional topics of interest to the USAF, DOD, and other federal organizations when adequate manpower and financial resources are available and/or provided by a sponsor. In addition, AFIT provides research collaboration and technology transfer benefits to the public through Cooperative Research and Development Agreements (CRADAs)

Neuromorphic cross correlation of digital spreading codes

Includes abstract.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 85-88).The study of neural networks is inspired by the mystery of how the brain works. In a quest to solve this mystery, scientists and engineers hope that they will learn how to build more powerful computational systems that are capable of processing information much more efficiently than today’s digital computer systems. This dissertation involves a biologically inspired circuit which can be used as an alternative for a cross correlation engine. Cross correlation engines are widely used in spread spectrum, wireless communication systems that use digital spreading codes to divide a single communication medium into separate channels. This technology is used in many systems such as GPS, ZigBee and GSM mobile communications. The technology is renowned for its robustness and security since it is highly tolerant to signal jamming and spoofing. Digital spreading in wireless communication is also widely used in military systems and has recently been proposed for use in the medical sector for neural prostheses. A limitation of using digital spreading is that the computational demands on the cross correlation engine are normally quite high and is generally considered to be the limiting factor in designing low-power portable devices. In recent developments proposed by Tapson, it was shown that a two-neuron mutual inhibition network can be used to generate a cross correlation like function (Tapson et al., 2008). In this work, the two-neuron cross correlation engine is analysed specifically for application on a particular set of digital spreading codes called Gold codes. Based on the analysis, the neuron’s response to an input signal is optimised in favour of yielding a neural cross correlation that resembles the mathematical cross correlation more closely. The aim is to find a biologically inspired computer that is practically viable in an electrical engineering application involving a digital spread spectrum communication system

Air Force Institute of Technology Research Report 2018

This Research Report presents the FY18 research statistics and contributions of the Graduate School of Engineering and Management (EN) at AFIT. AFIT research interests and faculty expertise cover a broad spectrum of technical areas related to USAF needs, as reflected by the range of topics addressed in the faculty and student publications listed in this report. In most cases, the research work reported herein is directly sponsored by one or more USAF or DOD agencies. AFIT welcomes the opportunity to conduct research on additional topics of interest to the USAF, DOD, and other federal organizations when adequate manpower and financial resources are available and/or provided by a sponsor. In addition, AFIT provides research collaboration and technology transfer benefits to the public through Cooperative Research and Development Agreements (CRADAs). Interested individuals may discuss ideas for new research collaborations, potential CRADAs, or research proposals with individual faculty using the contact information in this document