Binary‐offset‐carrier modulation techniques with applications in satellite navigation systems

An important aspect in designing the modulation scheme for various satellite systems, such as the modernized GPS and Galileo, is to obtain good spectral properties and suitable spectral shaping. For example, in the future satellite navigation systems, some of the main goals are: low interference with the existing GPS signals, good root‐mean‐square (RMS) bandwidth, good time resolution (in order to allow the separation between channel paths and to decrease the synchronization errors) etc. Starting from the recently proposed cosine‐ and sine‐BOC modulation families for GPS and Galileo systems, we introduce a new, generalized family, denoted here by double‐BOC (DBOC) modulation. We derive and analyze the properties of the power spectral densities (PSD) and autocorrelation functions (ACF) of the DBOC modulation with various orders, we show its relationship with BPSK, sine‐ and cosine‐BOC modulations, and we illustrate via several examples how to choose optimally the parameters of this new modulation family, according to different optimization criteria. The examples are targeting at applications such as the design of suitable modulations for Galileo open service (OS) and public regulated service (PRS) signals, but the authors believe that the DBOC concept might be useful to other satellite‐based applications, when the available bandwidth is large enough. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Highly efficient techniques for mitigating the effects of multipath propagation in DS-CDMA delay estimation

Delay estimation in direct-sequence code-division multiple-access (DS-CDMA) systems is necessary for accurate code synchronization and for applications such as mobile phone positioning. Multipath propagation is among the main sources of error in the DS-CDMA delay estimation process, together with multiple access interference and non-line-of-sight (NLOS) propagation. This paper provides a review of main delay estimation techniques, existing in the literature so far, which are able to cope with multipath propagation, together with our novel delay estimation techniques proposed in the context of DS-CDMA systems. The performance of all these techniques is compared through analysis and simulations, considering also their relative computational complexity and required prior information. Starting from the traditional delay locked loops (DLL) and their improved variants, we discuss several recently introduced delay estimation techniques able to cope with multipath propagation. The characterization of these methods is given in a unified framework, suited for both rectangular and root raised cosine pulse shapes. The main focus in the performance comparison of the algorithms is on the closely-spaced multipath scenario, since this situation is the most challenging for achieving diversity gain with low delay spreads and for estimating LOS component with high accuracy in positioning applications.