Multipath remains a dominant source of ranging errors in any Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS), such as the Global Positioning System (GPS) or the developing European satellite navigation system Galileo. Multipath is undesirable in the context of GNSS, since the reception of multipath can create significant distortion to the shape of the correlation function used in the time delay estimate of a Delay Locked Loop (DLL) of a navigation receiver, leading to an error in the receiver's position estimate. Therefore, in order to mitigate the impact of multipath on a navigation receiver, the multipath problem has been approached from several directions, including the development of novel signal processing techniques. Many of these techniques rely on modifying the tracking loop discriminator (i.e., the DLL and its enhanced variants) in order to make it resistant to multipath, but their performance in severe ...

The provision of accurate positioning is becoming essential to our modern society. One of the main reasons is the great success and ease of use of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSSs), which has led to an unprecedented amount of GNSS-based applications. In particular, the current trend shows that a new era of GNSS-based applications and services is emerging. These applications are the so-called critical applications, in which the physical safety of users may be in danger due to a miss-performance of the positioning system. These applications have very stringent requirements in terms of integrity. Integrity is a measure of reliability and trust that can be placed on the information provided by the system. Integrity algorithms were originally designed for civil aviation in the 1980s. Unfortunately, GNSS-based critical applications are often associated with terrestrial environments and original integrity algorithms usually fail. ...

This dissertation investigates robust signal processing and machine learning techniques, with the objective of improving the robustness of two applications against various threats, namely Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) based positioning and satellite imaging. GNSS technology is widely used in different fields, such as autonomous navigation, asset tracking, or smartphone positioning, while the satellite imaging plays a central role in monitoring, detecting and estimating the intensity of key natural phenomena, such as flooding prediction and earthquake detection. Considering the use of both GNSS positioning and satellite imaging in critical and safety-of-life applications, it is necessary to protect those two technologies from either intentional or unintentional threats. In the real world, the common threats to GNSS technology include multipath propagation and intentional/unintentional interferences. This thesis investigates methods to mitigate the influence of such sources of error, with the final objective of ...

Applications for the new generations of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) are developing rapidly and attract a great interest. Both US Global Positioning System (GPS) and European Galileo signals use Direct Sequence-Code Division Multiple Access (DS-CDMA) technology, where code and frequency synchronization are important stages at the receiver. The GNSS receivers estimate jointly the code phase and the Doppler spread through a two-dimensional searching process in time-frequency plane. Since both GPS and Galileo systems will send several signals on the same carriers, a new modulation type - the Binary Offset Carrier (BOC) modulation, has been selected. The main target of this modulation is to provide a better spectral separation with the existing BPSK-modulated GPS signals, while allowing optimal usage of the available bandwidth for different GNSS signals. The BOC modulation family includes several BOC variants, such as sine BOC (SinBOC), ...

The multi-frequency Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) signals are designed to overcome the inherent performance limitations of single-frequency receivers. However, the processing of multiple frequency signals in a time-varying GNSS signal environment which are potentially affected by multipath, ionosphere scintillation, blockage, and interference is quite challenging, as each signal is influenced differently by channel effects according to its Radio Frequency (RF). In order to get the benefit of synchronously/coherently generated multiple frequency signals, advanced receiver signal processing techniques need to be developed. The aim of this research thesis is to extract the best performance benefits out of multifrequency GNSS signals in a time-varying GNSS signal environment. To accomplish this objective, it is necessary to analyze the multi-frequency signal characteristics and to investigate suitable signal processing algorithms in order to enable the best performance of each signal. The GNSS receiver position ...

Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS)-based localization and attitude determination are essential for many navigation and control systems widely used in aircrafts, spacecrafts, vessels, automobiles, and other dynamic platforms. A GNSS receiver can generate pseudo-range and carrier-phase observations based on the signals transmitted from the navigation satellites. Since the accuracy of the carrier phase is two orders of magnitude higher than that of the pseudo-range, it is crucial to employ the precise GNSS data, the carrier phase, to perform a high-accuracy position or/and attitude estimate. The main challenge to fully utilizing carrier-phase observations is to successfully resolve the unknown integer parts (number of whole cycles), a process usually referred to as integer ambiguity resolution. Many methods have been developed to resolve integer ambiguities with different performance offerings. Under challenging environments with insufficient tracked satellites, significant multipath interference, and severe atmospheric effects, ...

This Dissertation addresses the signal acquisition problem using antenna arrays in the general framework of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) receivers. GNSSs provide the necessary infrastructures for a myriad of applications and services that demand a robust and accurate positioning service. GNSS ranging signals are received with very low signal-to-noise ratio. Despite that the GNSS CDMA modulation offers limited protection against Radio Frequency Interferences (RFI), an interference that exceeds the processing gain can easily degrade receivers' performance or even deny completely the GNSS service. A growing concern of this problem has appeared in recent times. A single-antenna receiver can make use of time and frequency diversity to mitigate interferences, even though the performance of these techniques is compromised in the presence of wideband interferences. Antenna arrays receivers can benefit from spatial-domain processing, and thus mitigate the effects of interfering signals. ...

This Dissertation addresses the synchronization problem using an array of antennas in the general framework of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) receivers. Positioning systems are based on time delay and frequency-shift estimation of the incoming signals in the receiver side, in order to compute the user's location. Sources of accuracy degradation in satellite-based navigation systems are well-known, and their mitigation has deserved the attention of a number of researchers in latter times. While atmospheric-dependant sources (delays that depend on the ionosphere and troposphere conditions) can be greatly mitigated by differential systems external to the receiver's operation, the multipath effect is location-dependant and remains as the most important cause of accuracy degradation in time delay estimation, and consequently in position estimation, becoming a signal processing challenge. Traditional approaches to time delay estimation are often embodied in a communication systems framework. Indeed, ...

This dissertation deals with the design of satellite-based navigation receivers. The term Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) refers to those navigation systems based on a constellation of satellites, which emit ranging signals useful for positioning. Although the american GPS is probably the most popular, the european contribution (Galileo) will be operative soon. Other global and regional systems exist, all with the same objective: aid user's positioning. Initially, the thesis provides the state-of-the-art in GNSS: navigation signals structure and receiver architecture. The design of a GNSS receiver consists of a number of functional blocks. From the antenna to the fi nal position calculation, the design poses challenges in many research areas. Although the Radio Frequency chain of the receiver is commented in the thesis, the main objective of the dissertation is on the signal processing algorithms applied after signal digitation. These ...

This thesis deals with the synchronization of one or several replicas of a known signal received in a scenario with multipath propagation and directional interference. A connecting theme along this work is the systematic application of the maximum likelihood (ML) principle together with a signal model in which the spatial signatures are unstructured and the noise term is Gaussian- distributed with an unknown correlation matrix. This last assumption is key in obtaining estimators that are capable of mitigating the disturbing signals that exhibit a certain structure, and this is achieved without resorting to the estimation of the parameters of those signals. On the other hand, the assumption of unstructured spatial signatures is interesting from a practical standpoint and facilitates the estimation problem since the estimates of these signatures can be obtained in closed form. This constitutes a first step towards ...

Digital subscriber line (DSL) technology is one of the fastest growing broadband internet access media. Whereas asymmetric DSL (ADSL) already offers data rates of a few megabits per second, next-generation ADSL2+ and VDSL promise even higher bit rates to support so-called triple play (high-quality video, voice and high-speed data). The use of a large bandwidth over the phone line (up to 12 MHz for VDSL) induces impairments, such as severe channel distortion, echo, narrow-band radiofrequency interference (RFI) and crosstalk from other DSL systems. DSL communication makes use of so-called discrete multitone (DMT) modulation, supplemented with advanced digital signal processing algorithms, to tackle these impairments and serve a maximum number of customers. In this thesis, we focus on channel equalization and RFI mitigation algorithms that outperform existing algorithms in terms of bit rate. DMT equalization is typically done by means of ...

The separation of independent sources from mixed observed data is a fundamental and challenging signal processing problem. In many practical situations, one or more desired signals need to be recovered from the mixtures only. A typical example is speech recordings made in an acoustic environment in the presence of background noise and/or competing speakers. Other examples include EEG signals, passive sonar applications and cross-talk in data communications. The audio signal separation problem is sometimes referred to as The Cocktail Party Problem. When several people in the same room are conversing at the same time, it is remarkable that a person is able to choose to concentrate on one of the speakers and listen to his or her speech flow unimpeded. This ability, usually referred to as the binaural cocktail party effect, results in part from binaural (two-eared) hearing. In contrast, ...

It is well known that Ultra WideBand (UWB) transmission is inherently robust against small-scale-fading (SSF) that arises in multipath scattering environments, due to its large signal bandwidth. However, no model with a physical interpretation exists that relates the variations of received signal strength to the signal bandwidth and general channel parameters, like e.g. the average channel power delay profile. Such a model would be of relevance for e.g. system designers, who have to make tradeoffs between system aspects, like complexity and energy efficiency on one hand, and robustness against small-scale fading on the other hand. In this thesis, a model is presented that allows for such a tradeoff analysis, relating the average power delay profile parameters and signal bandwidth to the statistical properties of the SSF. Additionally, it is shown how the uncoded and coded BER of BPSK modulation can ...

Acquisition is the first stage of a Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) receiver and has the goal to determine which signals are in view and provide rough estimates of the signal parameters. The main objective of the thesis was to provide a complete and cohesive analysis of the acquisition process clarifying different aspects often neglected in the literature. The thesis provides the statistical tools required for the characterization of the acquisition process. In particular, the signal presence is determined by searching several candidates for the signal code delay and Doppler frequency which define a cell of the acquisition search space. Thus, the acquisition process is characterized by the strategy adopted for searching for the signal parameters and the way a decision metric is compute for each cell of the search space. Given this observation, the thesis introduces the concepts of ...

This dissertation explores advancements in future navigation satellite systems, proposing and analyzing solutions at system, signals, and user level. The objective of this work has been to seek for performance improvements, acting at various levels of the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) value chain, yet fulfilling possible upcoming needs and constraints. In this context, this work focuses on improving the use of resources, both upstream, to enhance signals and services, and downstream, by leveraging such signals for a better user performance. Specific research questions were addressed for this purpose: how can inter-satellite links (ISLs) be assigned while optimizing data and navigation performance? Can multiple signals transmission be more efficient? How can we leverage signal multiplicity and receiver technologies to improve accuracy and robustness of the final position, velocity, and time (PVT) estimation? The first part focuses on space segment evolution, ...