Robust Multi-Antenna Acquisition in Time, Frequency and Space for a Digital Beamforming Receiver

For safety-critical applications of global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) radio frequency interference (RFI) is a major concern. A promising solution for this problem is adaptive antenna signal processing. This paper is focused on the effective usage of the antenna array signals during the signal acquisition step. It is shown how the beamforming gain can be used when extending the acquisition search space by the additional domain ”space” (i.e. ”direction of arrival”). Taking into account that Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) based correlation techniques are more and more used in GNSS receivers, a combination of the array antenna acquisition with interference mitigation using frequency domain adaptive filtering (FDAF) is considered. The performance improvements for signal acquisition in several interference scenarios are demonstrated using the results of Monte-Carlo simulations.