New Approach to Predict the Quality of Service of Vehicle-Based GPS System in Mobile Environment

This paper reports a novel approach to simulate on-vehicle GPS system performance which offers a fast estimate of quality of service (QoS) in realistic vehicle operation environments. The GPS simulator, which was developed based on the proposed approach, is a dynamic RF link budget calculator that calculates the carrier-to-noise ratio (CNR) at the GPS receiver in a vehicle with each GPS satellite vehicle (SV) in view at a given time. Monte Carlo method was applied to the RF link budget calculation process to account for the random nature of the vehicle dynamics and the broad range of vehicle operation environments. Performance of the GPS simulator was validated against that of the commercial hardware based GPS simulator.