Vector tracking loops in GNSS receivers for dynamic weak signals

Vehicle positioning with the global navigation satellite system (GNSS) in urban environments faces two problems which are attenuation and dynamic. For traditional GNSS receivers hardly able to track dynamic weak signals, the coupling between all visible satellite signals is ignored in the absence of navigation state feedback, and thermal noise error and dynamic stress threshold are contradictory due to non-coherent discriminators. The vector delay/frequency locked loop (VDFLL) with navigation state feedback and the joint vector tracking loop (JVTL) with coherent discriminator which is a synchronization parameter tracking loop based on maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) are proposed to improve the tracking sensitivity of GNSS receiver in dynamic weak signal environments. A joint vector position tracking loop (JVPTL) directly tracking user position and velocity is proposed to further improve tracking sensitivity. The coherent navigation parameter discriminator of JVPTL, being able to ease the contradiction between thermal noise error and dynamic stress threshold, is based on MLE according to the navigation parameter based linear model of received baseband signals. Simulation results show that JVPTL, which combines the advantages of both VDFLL and JVTL, performs better than both VDFLL and JVTL in dynamic weak signal environments.