• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.33 no.6C
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• pp.505-511
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• 2008

The global navigation satellite system (GNSS) is using a direct sequence/spread spectrum (DS/SS) modulation. In order to recover the information data, the DS/SS system first performs a two-step synchronization process: acquisition and tracking. The acquisition process adjusts the phase difference between the received and locally generated acquisition sequences within ${\pm}T_c/2$ or less, where $T_c$ is the chip period. The tracking process performs fine synchronization. In this paper, we focus on the tracking issue. The single delta delay locked loop($\Delta$-DLL) is the optimal tracking scheme for a GNSS in the absence of multipath signals, where $\Delta$ means the spacing between the early and late correlation time offset. In the multipath environments, however, the $\Delta$-DLL suffers from huge estimation bias(denoted by $\beta$) caused by distorted correlation values. Although some modified schemes such as a $\Delta$-DLL with a narrow $\Delta$ and a double delta DLL (${\Delta}^{(2)}$-DLL) were proposed to reduce the estimation bias, they cannot remove the estimation bias completely and need more accurate acquisition process. This paper proposes a novel tracking scheme that can dramatically reduce the estimation bias, using the maximum slope change among the correlation outputs.