Single-Antenna-Based GPS Antijamming Method Exploiting Polarization Diversity

The vulnerability of global positioning system (GPS) receivers to jammers is a major concern owing to the extremely weak received signal power of GPS. Researches have been conducted on a variety of antenna array techniques to be used as countermeasures to GPS jammers, and their antijamming performance is known to be greater than that of single antenna methods. However, the application of antenna arrays remains limited because of their size, cost, and computational complexity. This article proposes and experimentally validates a novel space-time-polarization-domain adaptive processing for a single-element dual-polarized antenna (STPAPS) by focusing on the polarization diversity of a dual-polarized antenna. The mathematical models of arbitrarily polarized signals received by the dual-polarized antenna are derived, and an appropriate constraint matrix for dual-polarized-antenna-based GPS antijam is suggested. To reduce the computational complexity of the constraint matrix approach, the eigenvector constraint design scheme is adopted. The performance of STPAPS is quantitively and qualitatively evaluated through experiments as follows. First, the carrier-to-noise-density ratio (C/N
₀
) of STPAPS under synthetic jamming is demonstrated to be higher than that of the previous minimum mean-squared error (MMSE) or minimum variance distortionless response (MVDR) based dual-polarized-antenna methods. Second, the strengths and weaknesses of STPAPS are qualitatively compared with those of the previous single-element dual-polarized-antenna methods that are not based on the MMSE or MVDR algorithms. Finally, the characteristics of STPAPS (in terms of the directions and polarizations of the GPS and jamming signals) are compared with those of the conventional two-element single-polarized-antenna array method, which has the same degree of freedom as that of STPAPS. This is a GPS L1 C/A-code proof-of-concept study, although STPAPS will extend to higher chipping-rate modernized global navigation satellite system signals.