GNSS array receiver faced with overloaded interferences: anti-jamming performance and the incident directions of interferences

Anti-jamming solutions based on antenna arrays enhance the anti-jamming ability and the robustness of global navigation satellite system (GNSS) receiver remarkably. However, the performance of the receiver will deteriorate significantly in the overloaded interferences scenario. We define the overloaded interferences scenario as where the number of interferences is more than or equal to the number of antenna arrays elements. In this paper, the effect mechanism of interferences with different incident directions is found by studying the anti-jamming performance of the adaptive space filter. The theoretical analysis and conclusions, which are first validated through numerical examples, reveal the relationships between the optimal weight vector and the eigenvectors of the input signal autocorrelation matrix, the relationships between the interference cancellation ratio (ICR), the signal to interference and noise power ratio (SINR) of the adaptive space filter output and the number of interferences, the eigenvalues of the input signal autocorrelation matrix. In addition, two simulation experiments are utilized to further corroborate the theoretical findings through soft anti-jamming receiver. The simulation results match well with the theoretical analysis results, thus validating the effect mechanism of overloaded interferences. The simulation results show that, for a four elements circular array, the performance difference is up to 19 dB with different incident directions of interferences. Anti-jamming performance evaluation and jamming deployment optimization can obtain more accurate and efficient results by using the conclusions.