No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.
A New GNSS Micro-Diversity System
... To reduce the probability of outages in mobile networks, receive diversity was highly preferred over increasing the power in the transmitter according to [10]. Towards the main theme of this work, receive diversity combining was used in [11], [12] to provide precise positioning in Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS). Another employment of reception diversity was reported in [13] using Frequency Divers Array (FDA) receiving antenna. ...
Internet of Things (IoT) networks connect billions of devices in endless daily applications. However, the IoT networks lack coverage in less populated areas such as oceans, deserts, forests, and rural, isolated regions. Therefore, future generations of communications must get satellites involved for ubiquitous coverage of IoT networks. The Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites are the closest to the earth and hence the best option to get engaged; nevertheless, they are often small satellites with limited resources. Consequently, such satellites create a challenging task at related Ground Stations (GSs) to receive, process, and decode their weak signals. This article presents a receive diversity combining technique as a solution for simple and cheap GS to improve the reception quality of small satellites' weak signals. To validate the suggested technique, the current study combined real small satellite signals from multiple GSs registered at the open-source Satellite Networked Open Ground Station (SatNOGS) global network. The results showed that combining multiple replicas of the satellite signals can significantly improve the link quality.
... Enlightened by the surveyed literature, receive diversity has proven its effectiveness and reliability in improving the system performance in different applications. Nevertheless, receive diversity has not been previously investigated in satellite communications except in combining large and capable satellites' signals for improving the location accuracy as reported in [17][18][19]. ...
The popular small satellites already attracted attention towards the integration into the future ubiquitous Internet of Things (IoT) networks. Small satellites can act as IoT base stations to efficiently collect data from sensors in remote areas and offload it to ground stations (GSs). The size constraints of small satellites, however, impose limited power resources and tiny antennas onboard. Consequently, weak signals and outages are more probable at GSs. Therefore, GSs must utilize high gain antennas with complex and expensive steering resources to collect such weak signals through a single radio link. This traditional scheme can track only one satellite at a time with more vulnerability to outages resulting from possible severe signal degradations or from steering engine failures. To contribute to a successful integration of the popular small satellites into the future sixth generation (6G) inclusive IoT networks, this work validates the concept of diversity combining in improving the reception of small satellites signals. Six versions of the small satellite VZLUSAT-2’s beacon were recorded by six simple software defined radio GSs registered at SatNOGS network and then combined. To assess the quality of the combined version, its errors are compared to the errors of the individual versions. According to the findings, if the GSs worked cooperatively in a diversity mode, they could generate a combined version that was always better than any other individually received stream. Furthermore, such a diversity-based scheme reduces the probability of outages and enables the simultaneous tracking of multiple satellites at each GS.
A Dualband Smart Antenna Set for Precise GNSS Applications in Car
- Sebastian Matthie
- Stefan Lindenmeier