Relief of Computational Burden for a Robust Carrier Tracking based on a Kalman Filter Implementation

The aim of this paper is to investigate an innovative carrier tracking scheme capable of maintaining the robustness characteristics typical of the Kalman filter tracking loop architecture and, at the same time, reducing the computational load due to the burdensome operations needed by the legacy Kalman filter implementation. Computationally speaking, the heaviest stage of the Kalman filter scheme is represented by the correction step where several matrices multiplications and divisions are conducted. Novel ideas for a light Kalman filter tracking loop are proposed, tested on a software receiver simulator, compared with a standard Kalman filter architecture and with the reference phase locked loop scheme, especially in terms of accuracy performance and robustness against feared events, such as Cycle Slips and Loss of Locks, in harsh environments.