Design and Implementation of SDR-based Multi-Constellation Multi-Frequency Real-Time A-GNSS Receiver Utilizing GPGPU

Due to the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) modernization, recently launched GNSS satellites transmit signals at various frequency bands such as L1, L2 and L5. Considering the Korean Positioning System (KPS) signal and other GNSS augmentation signals in the future, there is a high probability of applying more complex communication techniques to the new GNSS signals. For the reason, GNSS receivers based on flexible Software Defined Radio (SDR) concept needs to be developed to evaluate various experimental communication techniques by accessing each signal processing module in detail. This paper proposes a novel SDR-based A-GNSS receiver capable of processing multi-GNSS/RNSS signals at multi-frequency bands. Due to the modular structure, the proposed receiver has high flexibility and expandability. For real-time implementation, A-GNSS server software is designed to provide immediate delivery of satellite ephemeris data on demand. Due to the sampling bandwidth limitation of RF front-ends, multiple SDRs are considered to process the multi-GNSS/RNSS multi-frequency signals simultaneously. To avoid the overflow problem of sampled RF data, an efficient memory buffer management strategy was considered. To collect and process the multi-GNSS/RNSS multi-frequency signals in real-time, the proposed SDR A-GNSS receiver utilizes multiple threads implemented on a CPU and multiple NVIDIA CUDA GPGPUs for parallel processing. To evaluate the performance of the proposed SDR A-GNSS receiver, several experiments were performed with field collected data. By the experiments, it was shown that A-GNSS requirements can be satisfied sufficiently utilizing only milliseconds samples. The continuous signal tracking performance was also confirmed with the hundreds of milliseconds data for multi-GNSS/RNSS multi-frequency signals and with the ten-seconds data for multi-GNSS/RNSS single-frequency signals.