Pulse or digital communications – Spread spectrum – Direct sequence
Reexamination Certificate
2001-06-20
2004-03-16
Le, Amanda T. (Department: 2634)
Pulse or digital communications
Spread spectrum
Direct sequence
C375S148000, C375S150000
Reexamination Certificate
active
06707843
ABSTRACT:
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to multiple access spread spectrum radio receivers, and more particularly to receivers with enhanced ability to acquire and track a relatively weak signal in the presence of a comparatively stronger signal.
The difference in signal strength often can be attributed to the relative distance of the signal source and the receiver, and thus the difficulty in tracking the weaker signal in the presence of a closer, stronger signal is often referred to as the near-far problem of spread spectrum multiple access. This problem can also occur when one signal source is obscured from the receiver while another signal source has a direct line of site. An example of this would be operating a receiver inside a building, perhaps near a window or a door, thereby receiving some signals at normal signal strength while others are attenuated by the building structure.
2. Description of the Prior Art
The Global Positioning System (GPS) is a radio navigation system operated by the United States Air Force for the dual purpose of providing accurate global positioning information to military as well as civilian users. To this end GPS provides two services: the Precise Positioning Service (PPS) which is available primarily to the US armed forces and requires the use of receivers equipped with the proper PPS equipment, and the Standard Positioning Service (SPS) which is less accurate than PPS but is available to all users whether or not they have access to PPS equipment. The U.S. Department of Defense has the capability to degrade the accuracy of the SPS through what is known as the Selective Availability (S/A) algorithm, and has taken an official position that all such S/A induced errors will be limited to a 100 meter horizontal position error range (2 d-RMS). In contrast, PPS is accurate to within 22 meters.
GPS is essentially comprised of at least 24 satellites in orbit around the Earth at an altitude of approximately 20,000 Km in one of six orbits. Each orbit is occupied by at least four satellites. Each GPS satellite broadcasts a unique radio ranging signal that can be received by properly equipped GPS receivers. The signal contains information identifying the particular transmitting satellite and navigation data such as time and satellite position. On a fundamental level, all GPS receivers operate by tracking the ranging signals of multiple GPS satellites and determining the user's position in terms of latitude, longitude, and altitude or another equivalent spatial coordinate system.
The ranging signal broadcast by each satellite is comprised of two signals: the primary Link
1
(L
1
) signal broadcast at a carrier frequency of 1575.42 MHz and the secondary Link
2
(L
2
) signal broadcast at a carrier frequency of 1227.6 MHz. Both L
1
and L
2
carrier signals are spread spectrum signals modulated by digital signals, or codes, that “spread” the spectrum of each carrier signal over a specific bandwidth. The L
1
signal is modulated by three bi-phase (i.e. ±1) digital signals: the Clear or Coarse Acquisition (C/A) Code which is a short Pseudo-Random Noise (PRN) code broadcast at a bit (or chip, which refers to each pulse of the noise code) rate of 1.023 MHz (and thus spreads the L
1
carrier signal over a 1.023 MHz bandwidth by essentially breaking each bit in the original signal into 1023 separate bits, or chips, in what is known as direct sequence spread spectrum) and which therefore repeats every 1 millisecond; the Precise (P) code which is a much longer PRN code that repeats every week and is broadcast at ten times the chip rate of the C/A code (10.23 MHz); and a 50 Hz navigation data code (D). The C/A code is always broadcast in the clear (or unencrypted) whereas the P code is encrypted by an encrypting (E) code to form what is known as the Y code. The low data rate navigational code D comprises orbital parameters and clock correction information for the satellite modified by S/A.
Currently the SPS is predicated solely upon the L
1
signal but in the future the SPS signal will be available on both L
1
and L
2
. The current L
1
signal contains an in-phase component modulated by P⊕E⊕D (where ⊕ denotes the logical XOR function) and a quadrature component modulated by C/A⊕D, and can be represented for each satellite i as
S
L1i
(
t
)={square root over (2
P
L1i
)}×
e
i
(
t
)
p
i
(
t
)
d
i
(
t
)cos[
&ohgr;
L1
t+&phgr;
L1
]
+
2
{square root over (
P
L1i
)}×
c
i
(
t
)
d
i
(
t
)sin[&ohgr;
L1
t+&phgr;
L1
]
where A represents the signal power, &ohgr; the carrier frequency, and &phgr; a small phase noise and oscillator drift (i.e. clock error) component.
The broadcast satellite navigation data message D and algorithms to process it are defined in the publicly available U.S. government specification ICD-GPS-200. The satellite position portion of D is actually a prediction that is computed using ranging measurements of the GPS satellites taken at five monitoring stations distributed around the Earth. Periodically, typically daily, the GPS control segment uploads each satellite with its predicted navigation data and an estimated correction to its on-board atomic clock.
The satellite navigation data includes the GPS almanac which is used to predict the position and velocity of each GPS satellites for many weeks into the future. A typical GPS receiver uses the almanac data, the algorithms defined in ICD-GPS-200 and standard linear equation solving techniques to compute the position and velocity of each GPS satellite and to predict the expected range (PRN code phase) and Doppler frequency at which the receiver will find the satellite's signal.
Because all satellites broadcast at the same carrier frequency, each of the satellite ranging signals must be able to share this frequency with a minimum of interference from the other signals. This is accomplished by carefully selecting the PRN codes to have a sharp (1-chip wide) autocorrelation peak to enable code-synchronization and achieve equal spreading over the whole frequency band, and further have low crosscorrelation values, in a method known as Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA). The C/A PRN codes are unique to each satellite and are taken from a family of codes known as Gold codes. The GPS C/A codes are formed as the product (or modulo-2 sum) of two maximal binary code sequences (G
1
and G
2
) each 1023 bits long. The 1023 members of this Gold code family are generated by shifting the starting state of the G
2
register with respect to G
1
. Thirty-two out of the 1023 possible Gold codes were selected for the GPS satellites based upon two criteria: the number of ones and zeros in the code must differ by exactly one (i.e. the codes are balanced), and the crosscorrelation between any two of the C/A codes is no more than 65/1023 or −23.9 dB (normalized to the autocorrelation peak of unity). This crosscorrelation immunity is called the Gold bound, and represents the maximum interference between equal strength C/A code signals with identical frequencies. This PRN signal design enables satisfactory CDMA operation of the GPS system, i.e. as many as 32 satellites sharing the same broadcast band, provided that the received powers of the GPS signals are not larger than the Gold bound, which is typically the case.
The Gold code bound is applicable for signals with identical carrier frequencies. However, due to Doppler frequency shifts caused by motion of the satellites in their orbits and movement of the receiver, the received frequency of the GPS satellite signals is typically shifted by up to ±5 KHz from the nominal 1575.42 MHz L
1
carrier frequency. Relative to any single satellite, the frequency of other satellites may differ by as much as ±9 KHz.
The strong/weak crosscorrelation problem is worse if the signals are Doppler shifted. As mentioned previously, the C/A code's Gold code family is generated by forming the mod-2 sum of a selected pair of maximal
Cahn Charles R.
Norman Charles P.
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