Acquisition of weak GNSS signals using a new block averaging pre-processing

In this paper, we introduce a new approach for the acquisition of weak GNSS signals. For the GPS L1 signal, we utilize the replication property of the C/A code within each data bit to introduce a block averaging pre-processing (BAP) approach for improving receiver robustness against undesired signals. A large number of weighted signal blocks is coherently accumulated and synchronously averaged to obtain a single block with improved signal power. We present several properties of the proposed GNSS signals enhancement technique and we analyze its robustness against noise and different classes of interferers. Thus, we develop a software defined acquisition procedure using the efficient FFT correlation approach. We propose two acquisition algorithms based on the BAP approach. The first scheme implements the parallel code phase search in finding the 2-D spectrum peak using circular cross-correlations. In the second scheme, we exploit the BAP for a fast acquisition performing the frequency estimation prior to the 1-D code-phase search.