Stepped-Frequency Binary Offset Carrier Modulation for Global Navigation Satellite Systems

In this article, we propose stepped-frequency binary offset carrier (SFBOC) modulation for global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) that use spread spectrum signals. SFBOC modulation generates a binary offset carrier signal of which the subcarrier frequency varies stepwise within each period of the pseudorandom-noise code. The generated SFBOC signal can have a sharp autocorrelation function output and an almost flat spectrum over a wide frequency band. These characteristics result in correlation properties, multipath mitigation, and anti-interference that are superior to those of conventional GNSS modulations. To testify, we compare the performance of SFBOC in various aspects to conventional GNSS modulations and other time-varying subcarrier frequency (TVSF) modulations. From numerical simulations, we show that the proposed SFBOC has higher ranging accuracy, lower tracking ambiguity, and more robustness to noise, interference, and multipath than the conventional GNSS modulations. In addition, we demonstrate that the proposed SFBOC modulation has two advantages while other modulations with TVSF cannot have both; that SFBOC is robust to code-Doppler and that, when filterbank is employed, SFBOC improves the signal-to-noise ratio significantly without any loss of weak early arrival path in the nonline of sight multipath environments.