Unambiguous galileo acquisition using binary phase-shift keying-like parallel shift-and-combine method

Galileo will be Europe’s own Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS), which is aiming to provide highly accurate and guaranteed positioning services. Galileo E1 system has a code period of 4ms which is quadruple that of GPS C/A code. In other words, due to the large number of hypotheses in code phase at acquisition stage, a longer searching time or more hardware resource is required. It is difficult to acquire Galileo signal because of longer code length and the multiple peaks of autocorrelation function of BOC modulation. In this paper, the cyclically shift-and-combine (CSC) and BPSK-like architectures are employed to resolve the unambiguous acquisition for BOC modulation and acquire these satellite signals with hardware complexity reduction. The concept of CSC code is to modify the code structure and shorten the code period such that the acquisition burden can be decreased. Simulation results show that our proposed search algorithm can provide better performances in terms of low hardware complexity for acquiring these satellite signals and detection probability at the low value of carrier-to-noise density ratio (CNR).