A novel look into digital beamforming techniques for multipath and interference mitigation in Galileo Ground Stations

In this paper, we explore the adoption of Array Signal Processing in Galileo Ground Stations. The main motivation comes from the need of efficiently mitigating multipath and interference sources in order to achieve centimetre accuracy. One of the critical aspects appearing when an array of antennas is implemented resides on the array perturbations and mismodelling. For that reason, this work places special emphasis on this issue and some robust beamforming techniques are proposed. Differently from other studies addressing the use of conventional beamforming techniques for navigation applications, we propose novel strategies specially adapted to the considered scenario. As shown in the paper, the use of digital beamforming allows for a (at least) 47% reduction in terms of tracking errors when compared to a single antenna receiver.