Technique for MAT analysis and performance assessment of P2P acquisition engines

The first processing block within a Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) receiver is the acquisition engine. As it may represent a bottleneck for subsequent blocks in the receiver chain, it is essential to tune the acquisition engine to have any chance in designing an efficient receiver. Peer to Peer (P2P) networks present the opportunity to do so, by exchanging GNSS aiding information among nodes of the network to reduce the acquisition search space. Moreover, the Mean Acquisition Time (MAT) is often used as a performance metric and usually derived using probability generating functions and flow graph diagrams based on Markov processes. In this paper, an intuitive technique based on acquisition time and MAT diagrams is presented and used to derive an expression of the MAT as well as to analyze its constitutive terms. The MAT of a standard acquisition engine is compared to that of a P2P engine with a thorough investigation of a Gaussian search order and zig-zag search strategy to assess the performance improvement brought about by P2P networks.