Cross-band aided acquisition on HEO orbit

Global positioning system (GPS) has been demonstrated to be a valid and efficient system for various space applications in low Earth orbit (LEO) and medium Earth orbit (MEO), such as for location determination and time synchronization. However, in highly elliptical and high Earth orbits (HEO), the number of existing space applications is much smaller because of the very weak power of the received signals and the bad geometric dilution of precision (GDOP). To counteract these problems, one method is to add an L5 processing module to the existing L1 C/A receiver module. Indeed, tracking the L5 signal brings several benefits: 1) a higher ranging precision; 2) a pilot channel allowing long integration times, which is helpful for both acquisition and tracking. But this also implies several drawbacks, especially in resource restricted conditions: 1) the length of the fast Fourier transforms (FFTs) and the amount of memory needed for the L5 acquisition module is huge; 2) the acquisition time is very long because of the secondary code and large frequency search space due to the long integration time. In this paper, a cross-band aided acquisition method for the L1&L5 signals is presented, which satisfy the requirements for extremely high sensitive environment without any further assistance. Compared to a traditional architecture that would acquire the L1 and L5 signals sequentially, this method acquires the L1 signal in the first place because its structure is simpler and there is no need to search the secondary code, then uses this information to reduce the code and frequency search space of the L5 signals. This brings huge benefits to the receiver: 1) the resources needed for the L5 acquisition are tremendously reduced; 2) the acquisition time for the L5 signal is considerably reduced. The implementation on an Altera Stratix III FPGA shows that about 7 % of the logic, 18 % of the multipliers and 47 % of the memory can be saved with the proposed method, while the acquisition time is reduced by 99 %.