Detection of Constrained Unknown Beacon Signals of Terrestrial Transmitters and LEO Satellites with Application to Navigation

Detection of unknown beacons of signals of opportunity (SOPs), whether terrestrial or from low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites is considered. The abundance of SOPs promises an attractive alternative to global navigation satellite system (GNSS) signals. However, some specifications of ambient SOPs may not be available to the public. In this paper, a computationally efficient cognitive opportunistic navigation framework is proposed to (i) detect constrained unknown beacons and (ii) estimate their Doppler frequencies. Experimental results are presented demonstrating the efficacy of the proposed framework in successful detection and Doppler tracking for both terrestrial cdma2000 signals and Orbcomm LEO satellite signals.