Mean acquisition time of GNSS peer-to-peer networks

The acquisition engine is the most critical block within a Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) receiver as all subsequent blocks in the receiver chain depend on it. To that end, an innovative Peer to Peer (P2P) architecture is studied in this paper, where special acquisition engines are expected to perform better in terms of Mean Acquisition Time (MAT). This is due to peers nearby which share GNSS aiding information in terms of code delay, Doppler frequency and Carrier-to-Noise Ratio (CNR). It is thus expected to reduce the search space over which the Cross-Ambiguity Function (CAF) is evaluated as well as to initialize the correct integration time a-priori. The performance improvement in terms of MAT as a result of the P2P setting is tested against the standard acquisition engine in a comprehensive way. Indeed, the MAT of a standard acquisition engine is compared to that of a P2P engine with a thorough investigation of several search strategies where the best strategy yielding the optimum MAT is chosen for each acquisition engine.