A novel method for time delay acquisition in satellite navigation systems

We propose a novel code acquisition method for satellite navigation systems. We consider that the system uses long-codes where the navigation message is spread with a code with period much longer than the symbol period. The fine delay acquisition is performed by minimizing the mean square error (MSE) between the received signal and a locally generated replica of the spreading code. The most important advantage of the proposed method is that it is able to estimate fractional delays (i.e., a fraction of the sampling period) whereas correlation based techniques can only estimate delays up to the sampling period. In our case, the sampling period is equal to the chip period.