NAVSDR: A GPU-based Modular GPS Software Receiver

Liangchun Xu, Nesreen I. Ziedan, Wenfei Guo, Xiaoji Niu

Peer Reviewed

Abstract:	GPS software receivers are widely used in GPS-related algorithms’ design and implementation. Two significant considerations involved in developing a GPS software receiver are the management of the newly introduced algorithms, and the execution performance of the baseband processing. A Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) can be used to accelerate the execution of a GPS software receiver. This paper introduces a novel GPS software receiver named “NAVSDR”. NAVSDR adopts a modular design, which makes it scalable and reusable to accommodate new algorithms, such as GPU-based acquisition and tracking. The paper also proposes novel GPU-based acquisition and tracking architectures, which are independent of the GPU device, the signal type, and the integration length. The focus of the paper is on the following aspects: introducing the modular design of NAVSDR, demonstrating the detailed architectures of the proposed GPU-based acquisition and tracking, providing tests to evaluate the execution performance of the GPU-based acquisition and tracking, and describing how NAVSDR integrates the implementation of the proposed GPU-based acquisition and tracking properly and agilely with its modular design. The performance evaluation tests indicate that the GPU-based acquisition and tracking can accelerate the execution of NAVSDR significantly, especially for the tracking process. With an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti GPU and tested signals of 9.75 MHz sampling rate and 4-bit resolution, the GPU-based tracking in NAVSDR can achieve above 50 times performance gain at the peak compared with its CPU-based counterpart.
Published in:	Proceedings of the 28th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS+ 2015) September 14 - 18, 2015 Tampa Convention Center Tampa, Florida
Pages:	3198 - 3205
Cite this article:	Xu, Liangchun, Ziedan, Nesreen I., Guo, Wenfei, Niu, Xiaoji, "NAVSDR: A GPU-based Modular GPS Software Receiver," Proceedings of the 28th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS+ 2015), Tampa, Florida, September 2015, pp. 3198-3205.
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