Design of a parallelized direct position estimation-based GNSS receiver

Abstract

Theoretical results conclude that Direct Position Estimation (DPE)-based Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) receivers can achieve more robust localization than their conventional two-step counterparts. However, compared to conventional approaches, there is a much smaller body of work for DPE, and DPE receiver implementations are highly experimental. This work surveys DPE techniques from the literature and presents a software-defined parallelized DPE-based receiver prototype built on popular DPE techniques. The parallelized receiver software, along with a companion sequential implementation, is made available to the community as an open source. The GPU usage of the parallelized DPE-based receiver is profiled and compared to the companion sequential implementation and another sequential implementation presented in the literature. Through the literature survey, discussion of the open-source receiver software, and the performance evaluation of the receiver, resultant insights for design decisions are presented.