Improving carrier phase reacquisition using advanced receiver architectures

This paper employs advanced GNSS receiver architectures to more quickly reacquire the carrier phase data after a loss of lock. Specifically, a piece-wise control method and a phase prediction architecture are proposed. The piece-wise method takes advantage of different parameters in the control system to produce different transition performance within the tracking loop. With this in mind, the approach divides the reacquisition process into separate periods each with different control system parameters in order to achieve a faster transition process. In the phase prediction architecture, carrier phase measurements are predicted for satellites that have lost lock by integrating the estimated Doppler computed from the navigation solution. Predicted phase quality is evaluated in both empirical and theoretical ways. All algorithms are tested using real data collected under mild to moderate operational conditions.