A Carrier Tracking Loop Using Adaptive Strong Tracking Kalman Filter in GNSS Receivers

Abstract

The Kalman filter (KF) has been widely used in the carrier track to improve the tracking performance of receivers under challenging environments. The KF-based tracking assumes that the noise statistics are exactly known in advance and kept fixed during the whole iteration process. However, the noise statistics are difficult to know accurately and the fixed noise statistics cannot reflect the practical situations under time-varying environments. To further enhance the performance of carrier tracking, the adaptive strong tracking Kalman filter (STKF) is proposed. The adaptive fading factors are employed in the state prediction covariance to adjust the Kalman gain. Moreover, to improve the accuracy of fading factors in STKF tracking, the measurement noise covariance is adjusted based on the $C/N_{0}$ estimations. In addition, the working state is checked, and fading factors are used only when the system is not steady. The proposed algorithm has been implemented in the software receiver. The test results demonstrate that the proposed method has more superior tracking performance under challenging environments than other tracking methods.