Multiresolution Acquisition Engine Tailored to the Galileo AltBOC Signals

This paper discusses possible receiver acquisition strategies tailored to the Alternative Binary Offset Carrier (AltBOC) modulation that will be used by the Galileo system to transmit on the E5 band. In particular the work addresses critical aspects for the acquisition of AltBOC signals, not deeply analyzed in previous works, and an innovative acquisition engine called multiresolution acquisition is proposed. It can be used with coherent dualband AltBOC receiver architectures as an effective solution to the main problems in the transition between the acquisition and the tracking operations (risk of false lock, resolution of the search space and computational burden). Finally, some simulation results are presented and the advantages of the multiresolution acquisition with respect to conventional strategies are discussed in terms of Time To First Fix (TTFF) and implementation complexity.