EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing 
Volume 2008 (2008), Article ID 356267, 8 pages
doi:10.1155/2008/356267
Research Article

A Reconfigurable GNSS Acquisition Scheme for Time-Frequency Applications

Daniele Borio1 and Letizia Lo Presti2

1Department of Geomatics Engineering, University of Calgary, 2500 University Dr. NW, Calgary, AB, T2N 1N4, Canada
2Dipartimento di Elettronica, Politecnico di Torino, Corso Duca degli Abruzzi 24, 10129 Torino, Italy

Received 11 November 2007; Accepted 11 June 2008

Recommended by Sven Erik Nordholm

Abstract

The extreme weakness of global navigation satellite system (GNSS) signals makes them vulnerable to almost every kind of interferences that, without adequate countermeasures, can heavily compromise the receiver performance. An effective solution is represented by time-frequency (TF) analysis that has proved to be able to detect and suppress a wide class of disturbing signals. However, high computational requirements have limited the diffusion of such techniques for GNSS applications. In this paper, we propose an effective solution for the efficient implementation of TF techniques on GNSS receivers. The solution is based on the key observation that the first block of a GNSS receiver, the acquisition stage, implicitly performs a sort of TF analysis. Thus, a slight modification in the traditional acquisition scheme enables the fast and efficient implementation of TF techniques for interference detection. The proposed method is suitable for different types of acquisition scheme and its effectiveness is proved by simulations and examples on real data.