Demonstration of Cognitive Navigation with Terrestrial Digital Television, LTE, and 5G Signals of Opportunity

Shaghayegh Shahcheraghi and Zaher M. Kassas

Abstract:	A cognitive receiver is designed to navigate a ground vehicle with digital television (DTV) and cellular 4G long-term evolution (LTE) and 5G signals of opportunity (SOPs). Unlike conventional opportunistic navigation receivers, which require knowledge of the transmitted reference signals’ structure, the proposed receiver produces navigation observables without such prior knowledge. In the receiver’s acquisition stage, the multiple signal classification (MUSIC) algorithm is used to estimate the initial Doppler frequency of the received signal, followed by blind estimation of the source’s repetitive sequences. Tracking loops are then applied to fine-tune and maintain these estimates. Experimental results are presented demonstrating the efficacy of the developed cognitive receiver in navigating a ground vehicle over a trajectory of 598 m, traversed in 120 s. Fusing pseudorange measurements from a 5G base station (gNB), an LTE base station (eNodeB), and a DTV tower via an extended Kalman filter (EKF) yielded a two-dimensional (2D) position root mean-squared error (RMSE) of 4.3 m and a maximum error of 9.7 m. This demonstration is the first to show cognitive opportunistic navigation of a mobile receiver using DTV, LTE, and 5G SOPs without prior knowledge of the transmitted signal structure.
Published in:	Proceedings of the 38th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS+ 2025) September 8 - 12, 2025 Hilton Baltimore Inner Harbor Baltimore, Maryland
Pages:	2754 - 2762
Cite this article:	Shahcheraghi, Shaghayegh, Kassas, Zaher M., "Demonstration of Cognitive Navigation with Terrestrial Digital Television, LTE, and 5G Signals of Opportunity," Proceedings of the 38th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS+ 2025), Baltimore, Maryland, September 2025, pp. 2754-2762. https://doi.org/10.33012/2025.20456
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