Efficient and Innovative Techniques for Collective Acquisition of Weak GNSS Signals

Navigation and positioning in harsh environments is still a great challenge for many applications. Collective Detection (CD) is a powerful approach for acquiring highly attenuated satellite signals in challenging environments, because of its capacity to process all visible satellites collectively taking advantage of the spatial correlation between GNSS signals as a vector acquisition scheme. CD combines the correlator outputs of satellite channels and projects them onto the position/clock bias domain in order to enhance the overall GNSS signal detection probability. In CD, the code phase search for all satellites in view is mapped into a receiver position/clock bias grid and the satellite signals are not acquired individually but collectively. In this concept, a priori knowledge of satellite ephemeris and reference location are provided to the user. Furthermore, CD addresses some of the inherent drawbacks of the conventional acquisition at the expenses of an increased computational cost. CD techniques are computationally intensive because of the significant number of candidate points in the position-time domain. The aim of this paper is to describe the operation of the CD approach incorporating new methods and architectures to address both the complexity and sensitivity problems. The first method consists of hybridizing the collective detection approach with some correlation techniques and coupling it with a better technique for Doppler frequency estimate. For that, a new scheme with less calculation load is proposed in order to accelerate the detection and location process. Then, high sensitivity acquisition techniques using long coherent integration and non-coherent integration are used in order to improve the performance of the CD algorithm.

New Strategy of Collaborative Acquisition for Connected GNSS Receivers in Deep Urban Environments

Collaborative Positioning (CP) is a better localization technique used to locate a user in challenged environments, which is driven by the increasing presence of cellular phones and mobile devices in urban areas. The basic idea is that the mobile devices can cooperate with each other to improve their ability to determine their position. In this concept, a network of GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) receivers can collectively receive available satellite signals, and each receiver can receive signal measurements from other receivers via a communication link. This work shows how to use the Collective Detection (CD) approach to deal with the concept of collaborative or cooperative positioning. Specifically, this paper develops a new strategy allowing a receiver in deep urban environment to locate using the CD approach, while overcoming the implementation complexity problem. The idea consists in applying the CD approach in the case of multiple GNSS receivers to assist a receiver in a difficult situation. A typical case of two connected receivers assisting a receiver in difficulty in a deep urban area shows the effectiveness of this strategy. This strategy is tested with real GNSS signals to analyze its feasibility. The overall gain in complexity can reach up to 46% of what has been achieved in previous works.

A type of collective detection scheme with improved pigeon-inspired optimization

Purpose-With increasing demand of localization service in challenging environments where Global Navigation Satellite Systems(GNSS)signalsare considerably weak,a powerful approach,the collective detection(CD),has been developed.However,traditional CD techniques are computationally intense due to the large clock bias search space.Therefore,the purpose of this paper is to develop a new scheme of CD with less computational burden,in order to accelerate the detection and location process.Design/methodology/approach-This paper proposes a new scheme of CD.It reformulates the problem ofGNSS signal detection as an optimization problem,and solves it with the aid of an improved Pigeon-Inspired Optimization(PIO).With the improved PIO algorithm adopted,the positioning algorithm arrives to evaluate only a part of the points in the search space,avoiding the problems of grid-search method which is universally adopted.Findings-Faced with the complex optimization problem,the improved PIO algorithm proves to have good performance.In the acquisition of simulated and real signals,the proposed scheme of CD with the improved PIO algorithm also have better efficiency,precision and stability than traditional CD algorithm.Besides,the improved PIO algorithm also proves to be a better candidate to be integrated into the proposed scheme than particle swarm optimization,differential evolution and PIO.Originality/value-The novelty associated with this paper is the proposition of the new scheme of CD and the improvement of PIO algorithm.Thus,this paper introduces another possibility to ameliorate the traditional CD.