Coarse Self-Synchronization Technique for GNSS Receivers

In this paper, an original low-complexity technique for fast PN code acquisition is proposed. Its major advantage is that the receiver does not need to know the PN code itself, but only its length. We have applied the proposed technique in the context of GNSS receivers, and more specifically to Galileo, the European contribution to GNSS. The analysis of its performances (mainly in realistic environments) shows that the proposed technique significantly accelerates the signal acquisition process since it greatly reduces the search space. In fact, the correlation process in the synchronization step is no longer carried out for the whole data sequence but within a window of small length, which can be about 100 times smaller than the code length. Moreover, its architecture has a low cost implementation.