Optimization of demodulation performance of the GPS and GALILEO navigation messages

The demodulation performance achieved by any of the existing GPS signals, L1 C/A, L2C or L5, is satisfactory in open environments where the available C/N0 is quite high. However, in indoor/urban environments, the C/N0 level of the received signal is often very low and suffers fast variations which can further affect the GNSS messages demodulation. Therefore, since the mass-market applications being designed nowadays are aimed at these environments, it is necessary to study and to search alternative demodulation/decoding methods which improve the GNSS messages demodulation performance in these environments. Moreover, new GNSS signals recently developed, such as GPS L1C and GALILEO E1, must also be considered. These signals aim at providing satellite navigation positioning service in any kind of environment, giving special attention to indoor and urban environments. Therefore, the demodulation performances of the new GNSS signals as they are defined in the current public documents is also analysed. Moreover, new GALILEO E1 message structures are proposed and analysed in order to optimize the demodulation performance as well as the quantity of broadcasted information. Therefore, the main goal of this dissertation is to analyse and to improve the demodulation performance of the current open GNSS signals, specifically in indoor and urban environments, and to propose new navigation message structures for GALILEO E1. A detailed structure of this dissertation sections is given next. First, the subject of this thesis is introduced, original contributions are highlighted, and the outline of the report is presented. Second, this dissertation begins by a description of the current structure of the different analysed GNSS signals, paying special attention to the navigation message structure, implemented channel code and their decoding techniques. In the third section, two types of transmission channel models are presented for two different types of environments. On one hand, an AWGN channel is used to model the signal transmission in an open environments. On the other hand, the choice of a specific mobile channel, the Perez-Fontan channel model, is chosen to model the signal transmission in an urban environment. In the fourth section, a tentative to make a binary prediction of the broadcasted satellite ephemeris of the GPS L1 C/A navigation message is presented. The prediction is attempted using the GPS L1 C/A almanacs data, a long term orbital prediction program provided by TAS-F, and some signal processing methods: spectral estimation, the PRONY method, and a neural network. In the fifth section, improvements to the GPS L2C and GPS L5 navigation message demodulation performance are brought by using their channel codes in a non-traditional way. Two methods are inspected. The first method consists in sharing information between the message inner and outer channel codes in order to correct more received words. The second method consists in using the ephemeris data probabilities in order to improve the traditional Viterbi decoding. In the sixth section, the GPS L1C and GALILEO E1 Open Service demodulation performance is analysed in different environments. First, a brief study of the structure of both signals to determine the received C/N0 in an AWGN channel is presented. Second, their demodulation performance is analysed through simulations in different environments, with different receiver speeds and signal carrier phase estimation techniques