Methodologic Assessment of Beamforming Techniques for Interference Mitigation on GNSS Handheld Devices

Abstract

This paper proposes a methodologic approach for the performance assessment of beamforming techniques for interference mitigation on GNSS receivers. While the use of spatial diversity has been studied extensively for antenna arrays with a high number of elements, few studies consider the case of a small antenna array that could fit into a handheld device. Some uncertainties arise from this problem, such as the optimal position of the antennas given the low space available, the strong dependance of the performance to the Direction-of-Arrival (DoA) of both the desired signal and the interference/s, the minimisation of complexity due to the power constraints in handheld devices and the optimal beamforming technique to apply in such a device. These problems are tackled in this paper, providing insight on the performance that can be expected. Specifically, this paper focuses on the performance for GNSS receivers. A complete analysis on the key performance indicators for GNSS is performed, focusing on the effective C/N0 and phase and code jitters that can be expected after beamforming, which give a better assessment than simply taking into account indicators such as the interference null depth.