Multirate
Engine
Wide-band signal
Front-end 1
E5b
Front-end 2
E5a
1207.14 MHz
1176.45 MHz
Amplitude/
phase/frequency
recovery
y(t)
y
up
[n]
y
lo
[n]
y[n]
Figure 1: Multirate approach for the recovery of
wide-band GNSS signals. Two different front-ends
recover different portions of the signal spectrum. The
relative phase between the two spectral components is
estimated and used for the reconstruction of the wide-
band signal.
In this paper, the latter application is considered and
adapted to the case of wide-band GNSS signals. More
specifically, an analog wide-band signal, y(t), is split
into two or more sub-bands that are recovered by dif-
ferent front-ends. The sub-band components are then
processed and fed into a multirate engine that aims at
reconstructing a digital version, y[n], of y(t).
An example of such processing is provided in Fig. 1,
where the specific case of the Galileo AltBOC mod-
ulation is considered. Two front-ends are used for
recovering the E5a and E5b components of the Alt-
BOC signal. In order to produce a digital signal, y[n],
that closely approximate the analog wide-band signal,
y(t), the components obtained at the output of the dif-
ferent front-ends have to mimic the sub-band compo-
nents that would have been obtained by using an anal-
ysis filter bank applied on a wide-band digital signal.
For this reason, three requirements must be satisfied
by the components:
• they must be correctly equalized;
• they must be aligned in phase and frequency;
• they must not to interfere on adjacent bands.
The first condition implies that side-band components
should have similar power levels in contiguous bands,
i.e., the front-ends have to scale the input signal in the
same way. If multi-bit front-ends are used, Automatic
Gain Controls (AGCs) can scale the side-band com-
ponents differently , providing signals with different
magnitudes. If this effect is not compensated, the re-
construction of the wide-band signal cannot be per-
formed without significant distortions. The second
condition requires the alignment of side-band com-
ponents in both phase and frequency. The signals at
the output of the different front-ends do not in general
respect this requirement and additional processing is
required for compensating these misalignments. The
last condition is achieved using analysis filters that
remove spectral components that would alias in con-
tiguous bands. All three requirements are addressed
in the following sections and specific algorithms are
developed for compensating for possible amplitude,
phase and frequency mismatches.
In this paper, specific focus is given to the case where
two front-ends are used. However, the algorithms pre-
sented are general and can be extended to use several
front-ends.
3 SIGNAL RECONSTRUCTION
In this section, the procedure adopted for the recon-
struction of wide-band GNSS signals is detailed. It
is noted that the two side-band components cannot be
directly recombined, since they have different centre
frequencies and phases; they have to be up-sampled
to the sampling frequency of the wide-band signal to
be reconstructed. The following operations have to be
performed:
• pre-filtering for reducing out-of-band noises;
• amplitude equalization;
• up-sampling for doubling the sampling fre-
quency;
• frequency and phase compensation: the two
side-band components have to be aligned in
phase and share a common centre frequency.
These operations are better detailed in Fig. 2 where
two side-band components are at first filtered for re-
ducing out-of-band noise.
After pre-filtering, the signal at the output of the sec-
ond front-end is scaled by the gain β to avoid am-
plitude distortions. In this case, since the two front-
ends have similar frequency response and the input
signal, before de-spreading, is dominated by the noise
component, the two side-band components should be
characterized by the same power. Thus, β is deter-
mined as
β =
ˆσ
1
ˆσ
2
(1)
where ˆσ
2
1
and ˆσ
2
2
are estimates of the power of the
sub-band components. This operation corresponds to
sub-band amplitude equalization.