Experimental BOC tracking hardware platform

Nearly all Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) use Binary Offset Carrier (BOC) for their current or modernized signals. Although BOC signals have many advantages over the legacy BPSK modulated ones, BOC tracking is more challenging due to its multiple peaks in the autocorrelation function. This paper describes a hardware architecture, its implementation, and first measurement results of an experimental software-assisted hardware receiver capable of providing measurements of different hardware correlator implementations in parallel in real-time. Three different correlator types will be described with emphasis on their hardware implementation efficiency especially selected for BOC tracking. The advantages of the special BOC tracking correlators - Double Estimator and Astrium Correlator - will be demonstrated in comparison to a standard early-prompt-late correlator. It is demonstrated that the hardware building blocks of the Standard Correlator can be reused for the sophisticated ones. Moreover, the FPGA area consumption of the sophisticated ones is not significantly higher than for the standard one.