Joint Implementation of Interference Suppression and Signal Acquisition for GNSS Antenna Array Receivers

It is well known that, signal acquisition has the lowest sensitivity of the whole GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) receiver operation. Signal acquisition could fail due to insufficiency of interference mitigation and signal attenuation during interference suppression and thus it has become the performance bottleneck in the presence of interference. When a GNSS receiver works at acquisition stage, for traditional array processing methods, it is difficult to enhance the satellite signal through array gain due to the lack of essential priori knowledge. In this paper, a novel anti jamming algorithm is proposed. Compared with the traditional methods, which perform interference suppression and signal acquisition in sequence, the proposed method combines these two processes into a single algorithm. The main advantage is that, it is capable of providing array gain to enhance the desired signal at signal acquisition stage. Theoretical and experiment results show that, the proposed method could increase the signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) N times at acquisition stage for a N elements antenna array, and thus improve the availability of the receivers significantly in harsh interference environment.