New GNSS Signals: Receiver Design Challenges

In the coming years, many more satellite positioning signals will become available to civilian users. In addition to the L2 and L5 signals of GPS is the array of different signals that will be broadcast by Galileo. A Galileo receiver will be required to be fully compatible with GPS, so the receiver will need to be sophisticated enough to receive and process all of these signals simultaneously. In this paper, we examine the implications for the receiver designer: how the antenna design becomes significantly more difficult, how the frequency plan must be very carefully thought out, how the correlator “channels” will be more elaborate. It may, however, be possible to simplify the design somewhat if advantages presented by the use of software radio, software-defined radio, and reconfigurable techniques are fully exploited