Interference and Multipath Suppression with Space Time Adaptive Beamforming for Safety-of-Life Maritime Applications

Abstract

In this work, we present detection and mitigation algorithms against malicious interference, custom tailored for maritime GNSS applications. Specifically, we propose a two-stage mitigation algorithm, that tackles multipath and radio frequency interference (RFI), such as continuous wave (CW), personal privacy devices (PPD) and additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) interferers. It consists of a pre-whitening approach, followed by a space-time adaptive Principle Component Analysis (PCA) beamformer that uses a compression method based on Canonical Components (CC) with a bank of signal matched correlators. The proposed algorithms are capable of suppressing strong RFI and separating highly correlated and even coherent multipath signals, thus achieving improved time-delay and pseudorange estimation performance for safety-critical applications. Finally, we evaluate and compare the proposed algorithms not only simulative but also with real data collected from a measurement campaign performed at a maritime jamming testbed in the Baltic sea