Requirements and Analysis for a Robust E1 Galileo Tracking Algorithm in the Scope of the GAMMA-A Project

FP7 GAMMA-A project is a European project with the objective to develop a 3-frequency GPS/Galileo receiver concept for automotive mass-market applications. This receiver shall build on the excellent properties of the new and modernized wide-band Galileo and GPS signals to deliver high-accuracy and robust navigation and positioning. The MBOC modulation was specially designed to improve GPS and Galileo inter-operability and tracking performance at the E1 frequency. Therefore, a different tracking architecture is required to fully benefit from this modulation, and minimize the errors caused by thermal noise and multipath. This paper focuses on the Galileo’s MBOC realization, implemented on the E1 signal, and how it impacts both receiver architecture and tracking performance. In addition, this paper provides some comments and analysis on backward compatibility with pure BOC(1,1) receivers as well as on possible data/pilot combining algorithms. The work presented here was performed in the scope of the GAMMA-A project and investigates E1 Galileo signal tracking architecture. The scope of the investigated tracking schemes was limited by hardware considerations and constraints. The proposed tracking schemes are compared and analyzed, and the most suitable E1 tracking algorithm is selected and presented with respect to the minimization of the relevant metrics in tracking stage as code tracking error and multipath error.