Open Architecture Development System for Advanced Navigational Systems

Aleksandar Jovancevic, Andrew Brown, Suman Ganguly, Michael Kirchner, and Slavisa Zigic

Abstract:	Development of advanced navigational systems using conventional approach is time consuming and expensive. Recent developments in digital electronics allowed us to develop a complete development system suite, which heavily relies on software based real-time implementation. Complete solutions for development and operation of advanced high-performance navigational systems are provided through a variety of software and hardware products. These products are modular and seamlessly integrate with each other providing the users with a friendly, upgradeable, flexible and extremely powerful platform. Users can design and build customized architectures, modify existing architectures, evaluate performance under simulated as well as live scenarios and deploy the developed architecture, all using the same open architecture system development products. Complete navigational receiver can be developed using the following classes of components: RF front ends, software receivers, hard disk based storage systems, and modular correlators and DSP processors. Various functional elements are provided which can be put together to design and develop a variety of advanced GPS systems. In order to facilitate these developments, a GPS signal simulator is available which currently produces a data file that is read into the software receiver. Both L1 and L2 signals can be simulated and it allows the users to simulate a variety of conditions in order to evaluate the performance of a particular receiver design. These simulations are performed under precisely known conditions allowing accurate benchmarks that may not be possible by any other means. The system has been extended to incorporate M-code signal generation and Mcode receiver development. It can be easily adapted for the proposed civilian L2 and L5 signals, Galileo system etc. The advanced system has been used for the development of various novel architectures including beamforming, multipath monitoring and mitigation, scintillation monitoring and mitigation, interference rejection etc. The development system reduces the time of development of advanced architectures by about an order of magnitude. The objective of this paper is to present the structure of development system for advanced navigation systems. The development system consists of a hardware front end responsible for downconverting the signal to a suitable IF and sampling it. The signal samples are processed in real time using a software digital receiver or stored for later processing. The software digital receiver is implemented using modules that are easily configurable through a userfriendly graphical user interface. The correlator is implemented either completely in software or using FPGA for real time processing. A variety of software modules are available for advanced signal processing. Several GPS architectures using these modules have been implemented including scintillation mitigation, antijamming, and multipath mitigation to name a few. Both single antenna and space-time adaptive processing type solutions are used for multipath mitigation. Some of the results for specialized applications are presented. The software implementation of processing modules makes this system a truly versatile GPS receiver suitable for numerous specialized applications.
Published in:	Proceedings of the 2002 National Technical Meeting of The Institute of Navigation January 28 - 30, 2002 The Catamaran Resort Hotel San Diego, CA
Pages:	277 - 288
Cite this article:	Jovancevic, Aleksandar, Brown, Andrew, Ganguly, Suman, Kirchner, Michael, Zigic, Slavisa, "Open Architecture Development System for Advanced Navigational Systems," Proceedings of the 2002 National Technical Meeting of The Institute of Navigation, San Diego, CA, January 2002, pp. 277-288.
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