Performance analysis of GPS receivers in impulsive noise

The use of GPS has broadened to include mounting on or inside manned or autonomous vehicles which makes it subject to interference generated from motor emissions. Many sources of interference are typically modeled as impulsive noise whose characteristics may vary in terms of power, pulse width, and pulse occurrences. In this paper, we examine the effect of impulsive noise on GPS delay lock loops (DLL). We consider the DLL for the GPS Coarse Acquisition code (C/A), which is used in civilian applications, but also needed in military GPS receivers to perform signal acquisition and tracking. We focus on the statistics of the noise components of the early, late, punctual correlators, which contribute to the discriminator error. The discriminator noise components are produced from the correlation between the impulsive noise and the early, late and punctual reference C/A code. Due to long time averaging, these components assume Gaussian distributions. The discriminator error variance is derived, incorporating the front-end precorrelation filter. It is shown that the synchronization error variance is significantly affected by the power of the received impulsive noise, the precorrelation filter, and the sample rate.