Carrier Tracking using Extended Kalman Filters for GNSS Synthetic Aperture Processing with a Rotating Antenna

A single GNSS antenna moving along a known trajectory can be used to synthesize a virtual array in order to apply spatial diversity techniques, e.g. beamforming. With these techniques, referred as synthetic aperture (SA) techniques, the receiver can mitigate interfering signals, including multipath. The use of a single antenna element, instead of an antenna array, significantly reduces the hardware complexity, and there is no longer need for precise calibration and system synchronization. Before SA techniques can be used to process the GNSS signal, a critical practical issue must be addressed: the carrier Doppler frequency caused by the antenna motion only, that we have called “relative” Doppler, must be isolated from any other carrier frequency contribution. We have called the sum of all these possible contributions “reference” Doppler. In this paper, we propose two new techniques making use of the so-called extended Kalman filter (EKF), in order to compensate the reference Doppler at the correlation output. The first method, named EKF1, tracks the carrier frequency using a conventional FLL, and then uses its output to feed an EKF responsible for the reference Doppler estimation. The second method, named EKF2, is an ultra-tight integration solution in charge of the carrier tracking, while simultaneously estimating the reference Doppler component from the correlators output. A comparison of these new methods with two previously existing techniques, in terms of their impact on direction-of-arrival estimation techniques, is presented. Synthetic and real GPS L1 C/A signals are used in this comparison.Real signal measurements were obtained using a GPS antenna mounted on a mechanical rotating arm –built in-house– to implement an approximately uniform circular movement.