A probabilistic model for on-line estimation of the GNSS carrier-to-noise ratio

Abstract This article is dedicated to the estimation of the GNSS signal carrier-to-noise ratio using the in-phase component of the signals as observations. In a GNSS receiver, it is the statistic of the correlation provided by the code tracking loop that is used to estimate the carrier-to-noise ratio. In fact, carrier-to-noise estimation is used to monitor the performance of GNSS receivers and the quality of the received signals. In this article, we aim at high rate carrier-to-noise estimation, namely the code repetition rate (e.g. 1ms for GPS C/A), in order to maximize the time resolution of carrier-to-noise observations. We show that in a 1-bit quantization receiver, the in-phase component of the signal can provide a direct observation of the signal amplitude, and therefore of the carrier-to-noise ratio. However, the model that links the 1ms rate observations of the in-phase component with the signal amplitude is non-linear. The non-linear expression that links the maximum value of the in-phase correlation component to the signal amplitude is derived. In order to estimate the time varying amplitudes of the signals, we propose an Extended Kalman Filter to reverse the non-linear expression with the noisy observations of correlation provided by the tracking loop. The proposed model and filter inversion method are assessed on synthetic and real data, while investigating the effect of the cross-correlation contribution of the visible satellites on the estimations. We show using real data that, for a 1-bit quantization receiver, the proposed estimator can achieve the same accuracy as a widely known commercial GNSS receiver with a much higher data rate. We also show that the proposed approach can cope with abrupt changes in the observations compared to a classical C / N 0 estimate.