Indoor Adaptive GNSS Signal Acquisition. Part 1: Theory and Simulations

Indoors, GNSS signal encounters severe multipath power loss and fading which leads to significant signal degradation of the amplitude and phase to perform GPS (or GNSS) signal acquisition. To overcome these effects, piling up received GPS (or GNSS) data is a traditional (or conventional) method; however, it exhibits two shortcomings (drawbacks or limitations): instable detection performance, such as the probability of false alarm (PFA) fluctuates due to changes of the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR); and elongated acquisition time caused by extended accumulation duration and over repetitive FA occurrence (or "penalty"). To overcome the first shortcoming, an adaptive structure is employed in GNSS signal acquisition that enables constant FA rate (CFAR) criteria to guarantee a stable detection performance on the GNSS signal acquisition. To overcome the second shortcoming, an adaptive determination on accumulation length is employed to minimize the accumulation duration; therefore, a double-dwell structure (DDS) is used to reduce the processing time "penalty" caused by FA. Simulation results illustrate that an adaptive, stable detection implementation and DDS reduce the average acquisition time by almost fifty percent (or by half or a factor of two).