A New Method to Extend Differential Integration for Weak GPS Signal Acquisition

Abstract

The Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers often encounter the problem of navigation bit sign transitions which decrease the receiver performance. In order to enhance the sensitivity of GPS receivers, increasing the integration time in the acquisition process is necessary. We propose a new method to extend differential integration for weak GPS signal acquisition. In our proposed method, Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) operation is applied to the presented algorithm to search the code delay in parallel. Meanwhile, the presented method has the capability of extending the differential integration time to multiple navigation data bit duration. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms compared to the conventional methods such as coherent, noncoherent, differential integration. This improvement is more than 69 % in the amount of output SNR to detect in the acquisition section.