Code tracking performance analysis of GNSS signal in the presence of CW interference

Continuous wave (CW) interference can cause severe performance degradation of global navigation satellite system (GNSS) receiver. In analysing the code tracking performance of pilot channel under CW interference, the signal spectrum consists of discrete spectral lines and the interference term of the correlator output shows the characteristics of direct current or sine. Thus the traditional assumptions that the interference obeys the Gaussian distribution and that the spectrum of the signal is continuous no longer hold. Considering this fact, this paper presents the analytic expressions of the code tracking error bound for the early-minus-late power (EMLP) discriminator and the dot-product (DP) discriminator. The derived expressions can be used to assess the susceptibility of code tracking performance under CW interference for the pilot channel of GNSS signals. Then the GPS L5 signal is taken as an example of the application of the derived mathematic expressions. The effects of finite front-end bandwidth, correlator spacing, and discrete spectrum of pseudo-random noise (PRN) code on performance are discussed. It is shown that the code tracking performance can be improved by choosing proper receiver parameters and some of the L5 codes are more vulnerable to the interference compared with the average level.