The Effect of Distortions Induced by Adaptive Antenna Arrays in GNSS Applications

Abstract: Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) are vital tools for accurate navigation and timing for both civil and military use. Due to the low power of the GNSS signals, these systems are sensitive to interference attacks. For wideband GNSS jamming, adaptive antenna arrays are commonly used to suppress interference.  This thesis focuses on how distortions induced by adaptive antenna arrays can affect the performance of a GNSS receiver and how prone different beamforming algorithms are to suffer from such distortions. To investigate this, simulations in software have been performed for static scenarios with two different beamforming algorithms and four different antenna arrays. The results show that the method for interference suppression that uses constraints in direction and frequency achieves a higher signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio, more stable acquisition over the hemisphere, and less fluctuating code delay error than the method that only minimizes the power of the output signal.