GNSS Terminal Concept and Demonstrator with Digital Beamforming for Future Advanced Applications in Navigation

Abstract

Advanced global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) like Galileo and modernized GPS will provide new services and thus require corresponding improvements on the navigation receiving systems, since interference and multipath signals can cause unacceptable performance degradation. For safety-of-life (SoL) applications, new beam-forming and signal-processing algorithms will be employed to overcome this problem. These procedures enable a more accurate and reliable navigation solution by suppressing interference and multipath signals and improving the reception of useful line-of-sight satellite signals. For the development and testing of these algorithms and in order to demonstrate new applications the Institute of Communications and Navigation of the German Aerospace Center (DLR) is building up a GNSS receiver demonstrator with improved capabilities for interference and multipath mitigation by utilization of array processing techniques. The aim is to develop a complete safety-of-life (SoL) receiver system including antenna array, RF front-end, digital signal processing, navigation solution and integrity assessment. This paper gives an overview of the general terminal concept and the system architecture. Also a first realization comprising a sub-array of four modules (2x2 array) with a subsequent four channel RF front end for GPS/Galileo L1 signal reception is presented.