GNSS Software-Defined Radio: History, Current Developments, and Standardization Efforts

Abstract

Receiver development has always been an integral part of satellite navigation, ever since early studies were conducted for the U.S. Global Positioning System (GPS). The very first receivers were huge devices, enabling a correlation of received satellite signals with internally generated code and carrier replicas by a mixture of digital and analog electronics (Eissfeller & Won, 2017). Advances in semiconductor technology soon enabled signal processing on dedicated chips. This technology was complex to handle and was primarily located within the U.S. industry. Despite the success of GPS and its Russian counterpart globalnaya navigazionnaya sputnikovaya sistema (GLONASS), internal receiver technology was barely

An Enhanced FGI-GSRx Software-Defined Receiver for the Execution of Long Datasets

“…The 1990s saw the development of SDRs through the seminal work on real-time GNSS SDR that was first introduced by Akos in [17][18][19], which inspired a lot of research on algorithm development. A GNSS SDR can be described as a software running on a general-purpose computer translating received GNSS signal samples into a position, velocity, and time (PVT) estimate [2]. Since then, the concept has been reused by many research teams who introduced their designs focusing on signal processing algorithms, receiver architectures and performance evaluation.…”

“…This led up to the development of the ION SDR standard [28]. Broadly speaking, three main categories of GNSS-SDRs have emerged with all of them defined by the use of general purpose processors to process radio frequency (RF) data from an analog front-end in essentially raw form, allowing some configuration flexibility and supporting the ION SDR standard [2]:…”

“…The availability of Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) software-defined receiver (SDR) platforms have fostered research and innovation in the field of satellite navigation by enabling researchers to experiment with new algorithms, signal processing techniques and applications. GNSS SDRs also offer greater flexibility and customization as compared to traditional GNSS receivers [2,5] by allowing developers to tailor GNSS solutions to specific requirements and integrate them into a wide range of devices and systems. GNSS SDRs also serve as a valuable tool for investigation, reproduction, validation and cross-verification of GNSS signals and by providing open platforms to explore and share raw recorded GNSS in-phase/quadrature (I/Q) datasets [3,4,7,8].…”

An Enhanced FGI-GSRx Software-Defined Receiver for the Execution of Long Datasets

“…This led up to the development of the Institute of Navigation (ION) SDR standard [17]. Broadly speaking, three main categories of GNSS SDRs have emerged, with all of them defined by the use of general-purpose processors to process radio frequency (RF) data from an analog front-end in essentially raw form, allowing some configuration flexibility and supporting the ION SDR standard [1]:…”

“…The availability of Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) software-defined receiver (SDR) platforms have fostered research and innovation in the field of satellite navigation by enabling researchers to experiment with new algorithms, signal processing techniques, and applications. GNSS SDRs also offer greater flexibility and customization as compared to traditional GNSS receivers [ 1 , 2 ] by allowing developers to tailor GNSS solutions to specific requirements and integrate them into a wide range of devices and systems. GNSS SDRs also serve as a valuable tool for investigation, reproduction, validation, and cross-verification of GNSS signals and by providing open platforms to explore and share raw recorded GNSS in-phase/quadrature (I/Q) datasets [ 3 , 4 , 5 ].…”