GPS L5 software receiver development for high-accuracy applications

The GPS L5 signal, part of the effort to modernize GPS, was designed to increase performance for civilian users. In order to fully exploit the structural innovations brought by this signal, new receiver architectures are needed. This dissertation proposes novel acquisition and tracking algorithms that can maximize the L5 signal performance in terms of acquisition robustness, tracking sensitivity and measurement accuracy.;A cascaded algorithm is shown to enable robust and direct acquisition of the signal. A coarse acquisition step that coherently combines the data and pilot channel is first used to acquire the PRN code delay. An intermediate 1-ms FLL-based tracking is then introduced to remove the residual Doppler error and a pilot-only fine acquisition step is implemented to simultaneously acquire the NH code delay and perform bit synchronization.;Different data- and pilot-only constant bandwidth tracking strategies are investigated to assess their relative performance in terms of sensitivity and accuracy in the presence of white noise, oscillator phase noise and receiver dynamics. Results show that the L5 dataless channel can increase phase and frequency tracking sensitivity by approximately 5 dB in addition to increasing accuracy. The superiority of phase tracking is also demonstrated since, in addition to enabling navigation message decoding, it is also shown to provide greater accuracy and better sensitivity than frequency tracking. Code tracking accuracy is also shown to greatly benefit from the dataless channel through the use of long coherent integration times. Further measurement accuracy can be achieved through an innovative technique that coherently combines the data and pilot channel at the correlator level.;Although shown to greatly benefit from the presence of a dataless channel, the constant bandwidth tracking is outperformed by the Kalman filter-based tracking in all areas investigated. The difference between the two tracking strategies is the most significant for carrier tracking where the Kalman filter-based strategy improves the tracking accuracy by approximately one order of magnitude and lowers the tracking threshold by approximately 3 dB. These two tracking strategies are also compared in the position and velocity domains. Results confirm the superiority of the Kalman filter-based strategy, especially in terms of velocity estimation.