Data and pilot combining for composite GNSS signal acquisition

With the advent of new global navigation satellite systems (GNSS), such as the European Galileo, the Chinese Compass and the modernized GPS, the presence of new modulations allows the use of special techniques specifically tailored to acquire and track the new signals. Of particular interest are the new composite GNSS signals that will consist of two different components, the data and pilot channels. Two strategies for the joint acquisition of the data and pilot components are compared. The first technique, noncoherent combining, is fromthe literature and it is used as a comparison term, whereas the analysis of the second one, coherent combining with sign recovery, represents the innovative contribution of this paper. Although the analysis is developed with respect to the Galileo E1 Open Service (OS) modulation, the obtained results are general and can be applied to other GNSS signals.