The Global Positioning System (GPS) is used by the DoD to provide the position for accessing location and movement of ground, air and sea assets and threats and for precise navigation. For increased accuracy and anti-spoofing, the encrypted Precise Positioning Service (PPS) is utilized by the U.S. military and allied forces. The P(Y) code length and complexity requires precise time and ephemeris to provide successful acquisition and tracking. The required acquisition time and time to first fix is directly dependent upon the time accuracy and environment as current system do not perform well in degraded environments. A Cooperative GPS Networked Acquisition System (COGNAS) provides a network of participants and optimization strategies to enable successful acquisition and reduce acquisition and tracking time with initial coarse time and position estimates. The code search is partitioned across the network of GPS receivers effectively increasing the number of GPS parallel correlators. The optimization also increases performance in GPS signal degraded environments such as SV obscuration, multipath and interference.
Benefit: This research will produce a cooperative network of GPS receivers that allows consistent acquisition and reduction of time of acquisition and tracking by optimizing the code search across the network of participants. This can be extended to commercial GPS receivers for use in civil organizations to reduce the effects of GPS signal degraded environments such as multipath and urban canyon.
