Receiver Design for Satellite Navigation Signals using the Tiered Differential Polyphase Code

Abstract

Modernized GNSS signal structures tend to use tiered codes, and all GNSSs use binary codes as secondary codes. However, recently, signals using polyphase codes such as Zadoff-Chu sequence have been proposed, and are expected to be utilized in GNSS. For example, there is Tiered Differential Polyphase Code (TDPC) using polyphase code as secondary code. In TDPC, the phase of secondary code changes every one period of the primary code and a time-variant error is added to the carrier tracking error, so carrier tracking ambiguity exists until the secondary code phase is found. Since the carrier tracking ambiguity cannot be solved using the general GNSS receiver architecture, a new receiver architecture is required. Therefore, in this paper, we describe the carrier tracking ambiguity and its cause in signal tracking, and propose a receiver structure that can solve it. In order to prove the proposed receiver structure, we provide three signal tracking results. The first is the differential decoding result (secondary code sync) using the general GNSS receiver structure and the proposed receiver structure. The second is the IQ diagram before and after multiplying the secondary code demodulation when carrier tracking ambiguity is solved using the proposed receiver structure. The third is the carrier tracking result of the legacy GPS (L1 C/A) signal and the signal using TDPC.