Binary-offset-carrier modulation techniques with applications in satellite navigation systems: Research Articles

An important aspect in designing the modulation scheme for various satellite systems, such as the modernized GPS and Galileo, is to obtain good spectral properties and suitable spectral shaping. For example, in the future satellite navigation systems, some of the main goals are: low interference with the existing GPS signals, good root-mean-square (RMS) bandwidth, good time resolution (in order to allow the separation between channel paths and to decrease the synchronization errors) etc. Starting from the recently proposed cosine- and sine-BOC modulation families for GPS and Galileo systems, we introduce a new, generalized family, denoted here by double-BOC (DBOC) modulation. We derive and analyze the properties of the power spectral densities (PSD) and autocorrelation functions (ACF) of the DBOC modulation with various orders, we show its relationship with BPSK, sine- and cosine-BOC modulations, and we illustrate via several examples how to choose optimally the parameters of this new modulation family, according to different optimization criteria. The examples are targeting at applications such as the design of suitable modulations for Galileo open service (OS) and public regulated service (PRS) signals, but the authors believe that the DBOC concept might be useful to other satellite-based applications, when the available bandwidth is large enough. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. The work was done when Abdelmonaem Lakhzouri was working at Tampere University of Technology.