GNSS signal acquisition and tracking using a parallel approach

To reduce the processing time in Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) signal acquisition and tracking, we first propose a parallel method of signal acquisition and tracking as well as the associated software implementation in this paper. This paper applies the Message Passing Interface (MPI) and Open Multi-Processing (OpenMP) techniques for parallel computation implementation. This parallel method could put the multi-cores microprocessors to be efficiently used in GNSS signal acquisition and tracking processes. To further enhance the performance, this paper then proposes a new GNSS acquisition and tracking method, and it includes the multi-PRN code acquisition method we proposed in [Y. C. Lin and C. C. Sun, ION GNSS 2007] to reduce the acquisition processing time and a new FFT (Fast Fourier Transform)-based tracking method. This FFT-based tracking method combines the conventional tracking method and the FFT technique to track the incoming signal. Consequently, the tracking process is divided into two phases: detection and FFT-based phases. This proposed FFT-based tracking method can reduce the computational load as well. This new acquisition and tracking method will be combined with the above parallel method to gain the maximum improvement in GNSS signal acquisition and tracking. Finally, we use the real data collected by a software GNSS receiver to validate the proposed method. This paper will also conduct the comparison between the proposed method and the conventional GNSS acquisition and tracking method, and the comparison criterions are the computational load and the processing time. The experiment results of this paper show the effectiveness of this proposed approach for GNSS signal acquisition and tracking.