An efficient two-stage B1C signal acquisition technique for engineering implementation of the modern beidou receiver

The modern signals of the Chinese Beidou III navigation system bring new features compared to the previous civilian signals, such as longer spreading code, involving secondary code, new modulation technique (i.e. Binary Offset Carrier BOC), data/pilot channels and so on. These innovations are able to enhance the signal acquisition robustness, but they also require specific acquisition techniques to handle the large data stream, deal with the problem of sign transition and side peaks caused by the secondary code and the BOC modulation respectively. This paper proposes a novel two-stage acquisition technique for realizing efficient acquisition of the B1C signal in the engineering implementation of the modern receiver. The first stage employs an extended parallelized Averaging Correlation (AC) search structure, which can cope with the sign transition problem, to coarsely capture the signal with high efficiency. At the second stage, a fine-search process is completed within a reduced searching range to provide high precision result. The involving of the later stage aims to avoid the side peaks effect in the tracking stage that can easily cause a false lock. In addition, both of the single and channel combining acquisition techniques are introduced, which give designers an option of implementing the acquisition with higher sensitivity but more resources. The experiment results demonstrate that the proposed method allows to use much cheaper FFT blocks and enables fast acquisition by parallel process. The proposed method can reduce the number of multiplications by at least 61% when the sampling frequency is over 50MHz while providing quite similar acquisition precisions with the conventional method.