Interference and multipath suppression with space-time adaptive beamforming for safety-of-life maritime applications

In this work, we present mitigation algorithms to protect GNSS receivers against malicious interference. Maritime applications with an antenna array-based receiver are considered as a use case. A two-stage mitigation algorithm, that tackles multipath and radio frequency interference (RFI), caused by personal privacy devices (PPD) or additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) interferers is presented. Our approach consists of a pre-whitening step, followed by a space-time adaptive principle component analysis (PCA) beamformer that uses a dimensionality reduction (i.e. compression) method based on Canonical Components (CC) with a bank of signal-matched correlators. The algorithms are capable of suppressing strong RFI and separating highly correlated and even coherent multipath signals, thus achieving a reliable time delay and, therefore, pseudorange estimation performance. Finally, we evaluate and compare the proposed algorithms not only via numerical simulations but also with real data collected from a measurement campaign performed at DLR’s maritime jamming testbed in the Baltic sea. A complete description of the test platform and the scenarios is provided.