Reduced-complexity FFT-based method for Doppler estimation in GNSS receivers

In this article, we develop a novel algorithm for Doppler acquisition in fast Fourier transform (FFT)-based Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) receivers. The Doppler estimation is carried out in FFT domain by finding the frequency shift which maximizes the energy of the correlation vector. Subsequently, energy detection is used for preliminary decision about the presence of the target code. Then, the final decision and code phase estimation are done in the time domain after taking the inverse fast Fourier transform (IFFT). It is shown that the proposed algorithm has the potential for reducing the average number of required IFFTs in the acquisition process. For improving the sensitivity of the proposed approach, time-domain block averaging and FFT-domain non-coherent integration are investigated as alternative methods. They exhibit rather similar performance improvement, but the non-coherent integration approach is found to be computationally more effective.