Open Architecture GPS Receiver

Aleksandar Jovancevic, Andrew Brown, Suman Ganguly, Michael Kirchner, Slavisa Zigic, Logan Scott and Phillip Ward

Abstract:	The Global Positioning System is being used for a growing variety of diverse applications. All these applications have somewhat different requirements in terms of the receiver functionality. Although the core design is similar, the final development must be done separately. There is a need for unified platform that will allow receiver development and testing for various applications, thus speeding the design process and reducing its cost. Such a platform would need to have an open architecture and design flexibility so that modifications and testing can be done quickly and efficiently. Center for Remote Sensing has developed an open architecture software GPS receiver. It is a highly modular design suitable for development and testing of various receiver concepts. The potential applications of such a system are both non real-time, such as development and testing of new receiver configurations, educational tool for learning GPS operation etc, and real-time, such as complete system for navigation, time synchronization, atmospheric measurement, integration with other navigation systems etc. For non-real time operation, the receiver can be run on a PC. For real-time operation, the receiver utilizes a specialized hardware such as FPGA for correlation function. The software-based approach together with a digital storage of received signals enables a comparison of different receiver designs under controlled conditions. The objective of this paper is to present the structure of a flexible novel GPS receiver. The receiver consists of a hardware front end responsible for downconverting the signals to a suitable IF and sampling them. The signal samples can be processed in real-time using software digital receiver or stored for later processing. The software digital receiver is implemented using modules that are easily configurable through a user-friendly graphical user interface. The correlator is implemented either completely in software or using FPGA or DSP. A variety of software modules is available for advanced signal processing including multipath mitigation, anti- jamming, adaptive tracking loop control, space-time adaptive processing to name a few. The open architecture and software implementation of processing modules make this system a truly versatile GPS receiver suitable for numerous specialized applications.
Published in:	Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of The Institute of Navigation (2001) June 11 - 13, 2001 Albuquerque, NM
Pages:	489 - 500
Cite this article:	Jovancevic, Aleksandar, Brown, Andrew, Ganguly, Suman, Kirchner, Michael, Zigic, Slavisa, Scott, Logan, Ward, Phillip, "Open Architecture GPS Receiver," Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of The Institute of Navigation (2001), Albuquerque, NM, June 2001, pp. 489-500.
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