Dual-polarized GPS antenna array algorithm to adaptively mitigate a large number of interference signals

Abstract Intentional or unintentional interference experienced by the Global Positioning System (GPS) is a significant concern for GPS-based critical infrastructures and services including aviation. An effective way to mitigate GPS interference is to utilize a GPS antenna array capable of electronically changing its gain pattern. Although a conventional GPS antenna array consists of single-polarized antenna elements, a dual-polarized antenna array has the potential to mitigate approximately twice the number of interference signals in the spatial domain as a single-polarized array because of the additional degrees of freedom provided. This paper proposes an adaptive beamforming algorithm using a dual-polarized GPS antenna array for mitigation of interference signals with various polarizations. In this paper, a dual-polarized antenna element specifically refers to two co-located crossed linearly polarized dipole antennas. The proposed minimum-variance-distortionless-response (MVDR)-based space–time adaptive processing (STAP) method utilizes a novel constraint vector that is specially designed for a dual-polarized GPS array. As the proposed constraint vector considers realistic radiation patterns of the antenna, the performance of the proposed method in terms of the signal-to-interference-plus-noise power ratio (SINR) is noticeably superior to that of previous methods under a representative interference scenario. The performance of the proposed method is compared with three previous methods utilizing dual-polarized antenna arrays.