Channel Sounding Using GNSS Signals

Abstract

Measuring the land-mobile satellite channel by a channel sounder campaign involves in general massive costs. Using signals from GNSS instead could be considered as an opportunity providing large bandwidth, transmitter at accurately known positions and time synchronisation. The major drawback is the low received signal power such that features of the propagation channel might disappear in the noise floor. In this paper we assess the feasibility of using GNSS signals in channel sounding by applying estimation algorithms. Therefore, we first provide a theoretical evaluation followed by a tracking algorithm to increase the possible performance.