Faster Acquisition Technique for Software-defined GPS Receivers

Acquisition is a most important process and a challenge task for identifying visible satellites, coarse values of carrier frequency, and code phase of the satellite signals in designing software defined Global positioning system (GPS) receiver. This paper presents a new, simple. efficient and faster GPS acquisition via sub-sampled fast Fourier transform (ssFFT). The proposed algorithm exploits the recently developed sparse FFT (or sparse IFFT) that computes in sub-linear time. Further it uses the property of fourier transforms (FT): Aliasing a signal in the time domain corresponds to sub-sampling it in the frequency domain, and vice versa. The ssFFT is an FFT algorithm that computes sub-sampled version of the data by an integer factor 'd', and hence, the computational complexity is proportionately reduced by a factor of 'd log d' compared to conventional FFT-based algorithms for any length of the input GPS signal. The simulation results show that the proposed ssFFT based GPS acquisition computation is 8.5571 times faster than the conventional FFT-based acquisition computation time. The implementation of this method in an FPGA provides very fast processing of incoming GPS samples that satisfies real-time positioning requirements.