Receiver Types

Receivers
Title	Receiver Types
Author(s)	GMV
Level	Basic
Year of Publication	2011

GNSS receivers can be categorized by their type in different ways, and under different criteria. Besides the professional-grade receivers (e.g. survey and precision), commercial Portable Navigation Devices (PND's) are very common inside vehicles today, and smartphones appear more and more equiped with integrated GNSS receivers. These receivers are implemented in a wide variety of platforms, from ASIC, DSP or FPGA, to general purpuse microprocessors. The choice of the target platform is often a trade-off of parameters such as receiver performance, manufacture and maintenence cost, expandability, power consumption, and autonomy. Some of the diferentiating applications and receiver implementations, differing in a number of design decisions and approaches to GNSS solution computation, are described in the following topics.

Multi-constellation

With the emergence of multiple satellite navigation systems (both regional and global), multi-constellation receivers are becoming widely available. This has been encouraged at system design level by working towards interoperability and compatibility among all systems, allowing for seamless combination of the different signal spectra and processing chains into a single, multi-constellation GNSS solution.This approach reflects on the four global GNSS receiver implementations:

• Galileo Receivers
• GPS Receivers
• GLONASS Receivers
• COMPASS Receivers

From the receiver perspective, multi-constellation brings a key added value on solution availability, especially in urban canyon environments: with the increased number of constellations available, the number of satellites visible to the user is bound to increase. This allows several algorithm implementations to be further refined, and the final solution can be computed with higher accuracy and availability (for instance, see the improvements due to higher availability in Dilution of Precision (DOP)).

Multi-frequency

Several GNSS signals are allocated to different frequencies - for instance, the GPS L1 and L2 bands. Whether in single or multi-constellation approaches, receivers can benefit from multi-frequency signal processing for mitigation or removal of the frequency-dependent errors on the signals, hence improving receiver accuracy. The most important example is the correction for ionospheric delays, since these usually represent the main contributors to the overall measurement error.

Multi-frequency receivers, however, bring forth a new challenge, since there is a need for increasing RF hardware sections. Typical antennas, front ends, and filtering/sampling circuits are centered around one of the desired frequencies, and in most cases the same ammount of RF hardware is replicated for the other frequency (or frequencies) to process. For this fact, there is also trade-offs implied between cost, size, power consumption, performance, signal and band filtering, and analog circuitry quality.

Augmentation

GNSS receivers can also benefit from corrections or measurements provided by the available augmentation systems to improve their accuracy and performance. As the name implies, these smaller GNSS systems aim to provide augmentation Please refer to XXX for further information.

Differential

Differential techniques enable improved receiver performance (namely accuracy), by providing the receiver with additional information such as measurements from receivers in the vicinities or corrections computed independently. Please refer to XXX for further information on DGNSS, PPP or RTK.

Assistance

Aiding the receiver operation can be achieved by providing the necessary navigation data (almanacs and ephemeris) beforehand (e.g. via Internet), rather than waiting for the message itself to be decoded by the receiver. This can reduce the time to first fix (TTFF) and improve performance on challenging environments, where signal strength and satellite visibility may be low. Assisting information can also be provided by other technologies, such as Inertial Navigation Systems, WiFi, UWB or sending useful information over the internet. Depending on the solution envisaged, this might have an impact at several levels, such as availability or continuity. Please refer to XXX for further information on A-GNSS.

Tracking and solution computation

This distinction on GNSS receiver types indicates whether the solution is computed from the pseudorange measurements (which are noisier), or from the carrier measurements. Although the latter are less noisy, they present a natural ambiguity related to phase measurements, that needs to be solved at receiver level - see some of the available techniques for fixing the carrier phase ambiguity here. The trade-off, in this case, is complexity and processing power versus accuracy.

Services

Finally, GNSS Receivers may support multiple services provided by the future GNSS generation. As an example, Galileo will provide four services: Open Service (OS), Commercial Service (CS), Public Regulated Service (PRS) and Safety of Life (SoL) services, as described in XXX.

Related articles

For a generic description on GNSS receivers, please visit the following link:

• Generic Receiver Description