Energy Frequency Discriminator for GNSS Carrier Tracking

Yanbin Zhang and Dunshan Yu, Weijun Lu

Peer Reviewed

Abstract:	Carrier tracking is an essential task for the operation of most wired and wireless systems, which allows the receiver to precisely synchronize with the carrier of the incoming signals. With the emergence of new services and applications, the receivers should operate under much more challenging environment, e.g. high dynamics, severe signal attenuation. These critical requirements call for the development of new robust carrier tracking algorithms. In this paper, the conventional phase-based frequency discriminator is briefly reviewed and compared. Another approach of identifying residual frequency exists in the correlation energy losses relating to Doppler offset. On this basis, an energy-based frequency discriminator is proposed. Monte Carlo simulation results and real data implementations demonstrate that the energy frequency discriminator (EFD) can track even weaker signals, compared with the traditional arctangent discriminators. Meanwhile, it is insensitive to sign transition, and has large pull-in range which will shorten the time to first fix (TTFF). Furthermore, the concept of noncoherent accumulation can be adopted in this technique to more robustly track weak signals.
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:	3655 - 3661
Cite this article:	Zhang, Yanbin, Yu, Dunshan, Lu, Weijun, "Energy Frequency Discriminator for GNSS Carrier Tracking," Proceedings of the 28th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS+ 2015), Tampa, Florida, September 2015, pp. 3655-3661.
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