Journal of Network and Computer Applications 35 (2012) 1352–1360

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Journal of Network and Computer Applications

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jnca

Software-defined GPS receiver on USRP-platform

Elizabeth A. Thompson a,n, Nathan Clem a, Isaac Renninger a, Timothy Loos b
a
Department of Engineering, Purdue University, Ft. Wayne, 2101 E. Coliseum Blvd., Fort Wayne, IN 46805-1499, USA
b
Raytheon Company, 1010 Production Road, Fort Wayne, IN 46808, USA

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: A non-real-time GPS software-defined radio was designed, built, and tested using the Universal
Received 17 July 2011 Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) platform. A hardware front-end to receive the GPS signal and
Received in revised form downconvert it to an intermediate frequency was also implemented. Subsequently, the system was
29 November 2011
used to acquire and process real GPS data to demonstrate the capability of the design.
Accepted 25 January 2012
& 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Available online 1 February 2012

Keywords:
GPS software-defined radio
USRP
Hardware implementation
GNU radio software
Linux (Ubuntu) platform
Acquisition and tracking of satellites

1. Introduction
1.1. GPS signal
The Global Positioning System (GPS) consists of 24 to 32
satellites (Global Positioning System, 2010). Each GPS satellite
transmits a unique navigational signal centered on two L-band
frequencies in the microwave region of the electromagnetic spec-
trum: L1 at 1575.42 MHz and L2 at 1227.60 MHz (Rizos 1999). The
L2 signal is reserved for military use and is not available to the
general public. GPS systems utilize Code Division Multiple Access
(CDMA) spread spectrum transmission. Unlike Frequency Division
Multiple Access (FDMA) in which each user is allocated a portion of
the spectrum for all of the time, CDMA allows every communicator
access to the entire spectrum all the time, and multiple simulta-
neous transmissions are separated using coding theory, i.e., each
station is assigned a unique chip sequence. To transmit a 1 bit, a
station sends its chip sequence. To transmit a 0 bit, it sends the one’s
complement of its chip sequence. No other patterns are permitted
(Saha, 2010). In the GPS constellation, the unique chip sequence is
called the coarse/acquisition (C/A) code, and each GPS satellite is
assigned a unique C/A code, consisting of 1023 chips. The C/A codes
are generated at the rate of 1.023 million chips per second; hence,
the entire C/A code sequence repeats every millisecond (Rizos, 1999)
n
Corresponding author. Tel.: þ1 260 481 6361; fax: þ1 260 481 5734.
E-mail addresses: thompson@engr.ipfw.edu (E.A. Thompson),
clemnj@ymail.com (N. Clem), isaacren1985@yahoo.com (I. Renninger),
Timothy_S_Loos@raytheon.com (T. Loos).
URL: http://www.etcs.ipfw.edu/~thompson (E.A. Thompson).
For each of the GPS satellites, the C/A code and a Navigation
Message are modulated on the L1 and L2 carriers using binary
phase shift keying (BPSK), creating a spread spectrum signal. The
Navigation Message is transmitted at a rate of 50 bits per second
(bps). Its basic format is a 1500-bit long frame containing 5 sub-
frames, each of 300 bits length. Subframes 1, 2, and 3 are identical
in each frame. Subframes 4 and 5 have 25 versions with the same
structure, but different data, referred to as pages 1 to 25. The
transmission of a subframe lasts 6 s, one frame lasts 30 s, and one
entire Navigation Message consisting of 25 frames lasts 12.5 min
(Borre et al., 2007). The first 8 bits in each subframe are used for
frame synchronization. Subframe 1 contains satellite clock and
health data, subframes 2 and 3 contain satellite ephemeris data
which are required to compute satellite position, and subframes
4 and 5 contain almanac data.
The L1 carrier is also modulated with a private (P) code which is
reserved for military use. The C/A and P codes are generated as
pseudorandom noise and are thus referred to as PRN codes. The
bandwidth of the spread spectrum signal is 2.046 MHz for the C/A
code and 20.46 MHz for the main frequency band of the P code
(Rizos, 1999).
The goal of spread spectrum systems such as CDMA is to
decrease the transmitted spectral density to an extent that it is
well below the thermal noise level of an unfriendly receiver
(Stremler, 1992). Thus, the signal transmitted from each of the
GPS satellites is transmitted with enough power to ensure a
minimum signal power level of 160 dBW or equivalently,
 130 dBm at the earth’s surface (Rizos, 1999).
Traditional hard-wired GPS receivers typically contain Application
Specific Integrated Circuits (ASIC) or Field Programmable Gate Arrays

1084-8045/$ - see front matter & 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.jnca.2012.01.020
 E.A. Thompson et al. / Journal of Network and Computer Applications 35 (2012) 1352–1360
(FPGA) and are generally application specific. In contrast, a Software-
Defined Radio (SDR) offers flexibility in mode, operating band, and
functionality. Use of a software receiver allows fundamental changes
in the receiver structure to be made solely through programm-
ing, without hardware redesign. Therefore, software defined GPS
receivers are becoming increasingly attractive over their hardware
counterparts.
1.2. Software-defined radio for GPS
SDR is a rapidly evolving technology that is getting enormous
recognition and is generating widespread interest in the receiver
industry (Borre et al., 2007). The receiver employs a wideband
analog-to-digital converter (ADC) that captures all channels of the
software radio node. The SDR receiver then extracts, downcon-
verts, and demodulates the channel waveform using software on
a general purpose processor (Borre et al., 2007). Applying the
software radio approach to GPS receivers was first proposed by
Akos (1997). Since then numerous variations have been reported.
Heckler and Garrison (2004) described a software defined GPS
receiver developed at Purdue University for research and teaching
purposes that can be used in either real- or non-real time mode.
Subsequently, they described how the use of single instruction
multiple data (SIMD) operations on x86 processors could be used
to achieve real-time performance in software-defined GPS recei-
vers (Heckler and Garrison, 2006). Sharawi and Korniyenko
(2007) designed a non-real time GPS software receiver with an
RF front-end, downconversion to an intermediate frequency (IF)
and subsequent digitization using an analog-to-digital converter
(ADC). Lim et al. (2005) proposed the use of a pattern look-up
table of correlation values to reduce the computational load in the
software-defined GPS receiver. Pini et al. (2008) exploited the
capabilities of an SDR GPS receiver to evaluate the performance of
three different estimators of carrier power to noise power spectral
density.
1.3. USRP
The Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) has been used
as the basis of numerous SDRs. Tucker and Tagliarini (2009)
described several SDR applications such as radio scanners that
can be implemented with USRP. Tong et al. (2009) discussed the
use of USRP for developing a software based wireless transmis-
sion system that they used to test new algorithms. Wenmiao
(2009) employed USRP to develop a cognitive radio to be used to
transmit and receive incompatible radio standards. Marwanto
et al. (2009) incorporated USRP to transmit and receive the OFDM
radio signal with QPSK and BPSK modulation and to evaluate the
performance of each. Zhang et al. (2010) implemented and
evaluated cooperative communication schemes using USRP as
an alternative to simulation. Berizzi et al. (2010) demonstrated
that USRP can be used for realizing passive radars. Palmer et al.
(2009) used USRP to investigate non-GPS navigation technologies
to track the location of a receiver in the absence of GPS signals.
However, to our knowledge there are no published papers on the
use of USRP to implement a software-defined GPS receiver.
1.4. Real-time vs. non-real time processing
There are many applications in which real-time processing of
GPS signals is necessary. However, to compare the performance of
alternative algorithms, a non-real time platform is perhaps more
advantageous, for several reasons. For the latter, the speed of the
processor is not an issue since the data must only be saved to a
file for postprocessing. In addition, in non-real-time applications,
MATLAB can be used for the signal acquisition and processing.
1353
In contrast, real-time processing is considerably more complex on
an Intel processor, requiring the use of SIMD instructions.
Disadvantages of non-real-time processing include the increased
time required to copy files and process the waveforms, as well as the
increased storage capacity required.
2. Objectives
For research and teaching purposes, a non-real-time software-
defined GPS receiver was designed, built, and tested using the
USRP SDR platform in conjunction with GNU Radio software and
run on the Linux (Ubuntu) platform. A hardware front-end to
interface with the USRP was also designed and implemented. This
paper describes the details of this implementation and testing.
The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how the USRP can be
used to realize software-defined GPS receivers.
3. Methodology
Figure 1 shows the block diagram of the GPS software receiver;
Table 1 provides an itemized description of each of the components
in this diagram. Figure 2 shows the rooftop antenna installation.
Figure 3 displays the laboratory GPS receiver setup. The hardware
front-end is described in Section 3.1, the USRP in Section 3.2, and the
software in Section 3.3. Upon completion of the building process, the
system was tested for its ability to acquire location information, as
described in Section 4. Sections 4.1 and 4.2 describe the subsequent
calculation of the system gain and system SNR. The theoretical SNR
was then compared to the measured value for various quantization
levels, as described in Section 4.3. Finally, lessons learned and
generalizations are summarized in the conclusions.
3.1. Hardware front-end
The GPSRSSMA antenna was used to capture the 1.57542 GHz
L1 GPS signal. This antenna has a voltage standing wave ratio
(VWSR) of 1.5:1, bandwidth of 75 MHz, and 50 O impedance. To
minimize transmission line losses in the relatively large distance
between the antenna and other components in the system, an
active antenna, i.e., one with a built-in amplifier, was used. As
indicated in Table 1, this built-in amplifier was a 28 dB gain low
noise amplifier (LNA). As noted in the block diagram of Fig. 1, in
addition to the LNA built into the antenna, an additional external
amplifier/bandpass filter was used to assist in overcoming the
high cable losses experienced at 1.57542 GHz. This was a 58529A
amplifier with L1 bandpass filter, which is also an active device
that is designed to be installed close to the antenna for best
system performance. The data sheet for the device indicates that
it typically provides 20 dB gain in situations where the GPS
receiver and antenna are separated by large distances (up to
approximately 790 feet). Thus, both the GPSRSSMA antenna and
the 58529A amplifier/bandpass filter were installed on the roof of
a building, and the 58529A was connected to the antenna via a
SM4217 adapter. The 58529A amplifier/bandpass filter was then
connected to a microwave LMR400UF coax cable, of length 50
feet, which extended through the roof to a laboratory on the third
(and top) floor of the building. The 50 O impedance of the
LMR400UF coax cable matched that of the antenna. Since both
the GPSRSSMA antenna and the 58529A amplifier/bandpass filter
are active devices, they require DC power to operate. The SB3500
bias tee was used for this purpose. It is a three port network used
to supply the DC bias while passing the radio frequency (RF)
components with minimal attenuation. The SB3500 is designed to
operate in the range 700–2700 MHz and has the requisite 50 O for
1354 E.A. Thompson et al. / Journal of Network and Computer Applications 35 (2012) 1352–1360

Active Antenna
(GPSRSSMA)

Amp/BPF
(58529A)

Roof
Lab

Power Supply
(Heath2718)

Evaluation Board USRP1

Bias T Down Desktop
(SB3500) Converter RFX900 Computer
(MAX2682)

Local Oscillator
(Macroni 2022A)

Fig. 1. GPS software-defined radio block diagram.

Table 1
Hardware components of the GPS software-defined receiver.

Part Description Supplier

Antenna GPSRSSMA active antenna GPSAntennas.com

with 28 dB gain low noise
amplifier (LNA)
Adapter SM4217 adapter to connect Fairview microwave
antenna to Amp
Amplifier/BP filter 58529A amplifier with L1 Symmetricom
bandpass filter
Coax Cable LMR400UF Coax Cable to
connect amplifier to bias-T
Bias tee SB3500 Fairview microwave
4.5 V power supply Heath 2718 Tri-power Heathkit
supply educational systems
Adapter SM4215 adapter to connect Fairview microwave
Fig. 2. GPS rooftop antenna installation.
bias-T to Coax
Coax Cable S6001 RG-174 Coax Cable to Pro link LLC
connect bias-T to eval board
tee to a S6001 RG-174 coax cable which in turn was connected to
and eval board to USRP
Down converter MAX2682KIT evaluation Maxim the RF input of the MAX2682KIT Evaluation Board. The MAX2682-
board KIT Evaluation Kit contains the MAX2682 downconverter as well
Coax Cable S60301 RG-174 Coax Cable Pro link LLC as all the necessary interface circuitry for ease of use. It interfaces
to connect down converter to RF signal inputs and outputs via three subminiature version
to oscillator
Oscillator 2022A function generator Marconi
A (SMA) connectors. It has six connections for inputs and outputs:
tuned to 660.42 MHz instruments LO, GND, RF, IFOUT, VCC, and SHDN. The Heath 2718 Tri-Power
USRP SDR platform Ettus research supply was used to supply 4.5 V DC to the evaluation board. The
Daughterboard RFX900 Marconi 2022A signal generator was tuned to 660.42 MHz for use
750–1050 MHz Ettus research
as the local oscillator (LO) and connected to the LO input of the
PC Dell GX280 P4, 3.6 GHz, Dell
1 GB RAM, 40 GB drive MAX2682KIT via an S60301 RG-174 coax cable. The IFOUT SMA
connector of the MAX2682KIT Evaluation Kit was connected to
the RF 1 input of the USRP via an S6001 RG-174 coax cable. The
use of 660.42 MHz for the LO resulted in downconversion of the
impedance matching. In the laboratory, the LMR400UF coax cable GPS signal to an intermediate frequency (IF) of 915 MHz.
was connected to the RF/DC type N female connector of the
SB3500 bias tee. The Heath 2718 Tri-Power supply was connected 3.2. USRP
to the BNC female connector of the bias tee, to supply 4.5 V DC to
the antenna and 58529A amplifier/filter. The third port of the bias The USRP is a hardware platform which when interfaced to a
tee, an RF type N male connector, provided the outlet for the GPS host computer via USB 2.0 port may be used to create a real-time
signal. A SM4215 adapter was used to connect this port of the bias SDR utilizing open-source GNU radio software (Ettus Research
 E.A. Thompson et al. / Journal of Network and Computer Applications 35 (2012) 1352–1360
Coax going up to
AMP/BPF and Antenna
Power Signal
Supply Generator
Bias Tee Down Converter
Fig. 3. Laboratory GPS receiver setup.
LLC, 2010). It is a motherboard which contains a Field Programmable
Gate Array (FPGA) for high-speed signal processing, 4 high-speed
analog-to-digital converters (ADC), 4 high-speed digital-to-analog
converters (DAC), and auxiliary analog and digital input/output (IO)
ports. An AC-to-DC adapter supplies its required 5 V DC power. Plug-
in daughterboards allow the USRP to operate in various RF bands
and turn a USRP motherboard into a complete RF transceiver
system. The RFX900 is a transceiver daughterboard with a frequency
range 750–1050 MHz. In the present design, due to availability, the
RFX900 daughterboard was used, and the USRP was connected
to the Dell PC via a USB 2.0 interface. Alternatively, the RFX1800
transceiver daughterboard, which has a frequency range 1.5–2.1 GHz,
could have been used, thus eliminating the need for downconversion
to an intermediate frequency by the MAX2682 as well as the
corresponding local oscillator. Another possibility is the WBX trans-
ceiver, which operates in the 50 MHz–2.2 GHz range, but will not
work with USRP with a serial number below 500. The USRP digitized,
at a sampling rate of 64 MHz, the incoming analog GPS signal that
had been downconverted to 915 MHz by the MAX2682.
The full range signal power input on the ADCs of the USRP is
40 mW (16 dBm) (Shen, 2005). There is a programmable gain
amplifier (PGA) before the ADCs to amplify weak input signals.
The RFX900 daughterboard has a programmable gain between
0 and 90 dB. Each daughterboard has access to 2 of the 4 high-
speed ADCs and 2 of the DACs. This allows each daughterboard
2 independent RF sections if real sampling is used and a single
RF section if complex in-phase/quadrature (IQ) sampling is used
(Shen 2005).
The FPGA on the USRP performs digital down conversion from IF
to baseband, followed by low pass filtering, and downsampling to a
data rate which can be transmitted over USB 2.0 (Shen, 2005). The
digital down converter (DDC) on the FPGA has two inputs—in-phase
(I) and quadrature (Q). The output of the ADCs can be routed, under
software control, to either the I or the Q inputs of any of the 4 DDCs.
All samples sent over the USB interface are 16-bit signed integers in
IQ (complex) format—i.e., 16 bit in-phase (I) interleaved with 16-bit
quadrature (Q) data (Shen, 2005).
3.3. Software
GNU Radio is a free software development toolkit that provides
signal processing to implement SDRs using off-the-shelf RF hard-
ware (GNU Radio, 2010). GNU Radio applications are primarily
written using the Python programming language, while the perfor-
mance-critical signal processing tasks are implemented in Cþþ (GNU
Radio, 2010). GNU Radio is available for use with Linux, Windows,
1355
Linux
Desktop
spectrum
Analyzer
USRP
Mac OS X, and NetBSD operating systems. Ubuntu 9.04 is a Linux-
based operating system that was used for running GNU Radio in this
project. It was initially downloaded from (Ubuntu 9.04 Live USB
Persistent, 2010) with the intent of running it off a USB flash drive.
However, the excessive rate of data transfer pushed the flash drive
beyond its limits, and Ubuntu 9.04 was installed instead as the sole
operating system on the computer. GNU Radio Companion was then
downloaded and installed from (Debian Package Repository for GNU
Radio, 2010). The GNU Radio application file usrp_rx_cfile.py was
used to capture the data and perform digital down conversion. It
was used to read samples from the USRP and write them to a file
formatted as binary outputs single precision complex short values,
which consisted of 16-bit signed short I values interleaved with
16-bit signed short Q values. In the Ubuntu terminal window, this
function was invoked with the proper command line options to
specify 16-bit capture with a RFX900 daughterboard, gain of 40 dB, a
center frequency of 915 MHz, a decimation rate of 16, and 160
million samples to be captured (40 s of signal). The decimation rate
of 16 results in 4 MHz complex sample rate, which was adequate to
avoid aliasing of the baseband GPS L1 signal. The resulting binary
file was of size 640 MB. The number of samples acquired was based
on the necessity to capture at least 37 s of the waveform, which
ensures that all 5 subframes of the waveform (6 s each) are captured
and allows dropping the initial 1000 ms for transients.
Once this binary file was acquired, it was transferred to a second
computer that was equipped with Windows XP operating system and
MATLAB version 7.8.0.347 (R2009a), to perform some additional
processing and GPS position processing. The MATLAB software
provided with Borre et al. (2007) was used to generate the location
information. However, preprocessing had to be accomplished to get
the data into the proper format for that code. The output signal from
the USRP is a baseband complex signal with 16 bit I values interlaced
with 16-bit Q, but the MATLAB software provided by Borre et al.
(2007) assumes an 8-bit real signal at an intermediate frequency.
Thus, prior to implementing the code of Borre et al. (2007), the
raw USRP signal was digitally lowpass filtered, upconverted to an
intermediate frequency, and converted to 8-bit real signed bytes.
The lowpass filtering was accomplished using SoX software because
the file was too large for MATLAB. The SoX program was used to
filter the USRP raw output signal by applying a finite impulse
response (FIR) filter designed in MATLAB, as explained below.
3.3.1. SoX
Sound eXchange, abbreviated SoX, is a free cross-platform
(Windows, Linux, MacOS X, etc.) digital audio editor, licensed under
1356 E.A. Thompson et al. / Journal of Network and Computer Applications 35 (2012) 1352–1360

the GNU General Public License, and distributed by Chris Bagwell 3.3.2. MATLAB preprocessing
through SourceForge.net (SoX, 2010). For this project, SoX version The filtered output from the SoX program was fed to a MATLAB
14.3.0 was used. program that read in the 16-bit signed integer filtered basedband
A finite impulse response (FIR) Equiripple lowpass filter with a values, extracted the interlaced I and Q portions, and performed a
normalized cutoff frequency of 0.20, a normalized stopband fre- digital upconversion to an arbitrarily selected intermediate fre-
quency of 0.25, and 50 dB attenuation in the stopband was designed quency of 1 MHz per Eq. (1).
using the FDATool in MATLAB. Its frequency response is provided in    
2pnf m 2pnf m
Fig. 4. The resulting 85 filter coefficients were saved in a text file. y ¼ IUcos Q Usin ð1Þ
fs fs
Subsequently, a batch file was created to invoke SoX to filter the raw
USRP signal using these filter coefficients. This batch file was Here, I is the in-phase component, Q is the quadrature compo-
executed from the DOS prompt, which was accessed by opening a nent, fm ¼ 1 MHz, and fs ¼4 MHz. This fs/4 up-conversion allows
command window after selecting Run from the Start menu. SoX the I multiplication coefficients to be [1, 0, 1, 0, y] and the Q
treated the complex I and Q interleaved samples as a stereo audio components to be [0, 1, 0 1, 0 y] This MATLAB program then
stream, which treats the samples from left and right speakers as wrote the real values resulting from Eq. (1) to a binary file as 8-bit
interleaved in the same manner. signed integers.
Subsequently, the data type, intermediate frequency, and
sampling frequency in the initSettings.m file included in the
50 MATLAB software provided by Borre et al. (2007) were modified
as follows

settings.dataType¼‘int8’;
0 settings.IF¼ 1.0e6;
settings.samplingFreq¼4.0e6;
Magnitude (dB)

Finally, the init.m file in the Borre et al. (2007) software was
-50 invoked to find the GPS location information.

3.3.3. Navigation solution

The software receiver provided in Borre et al. (2007) performs
-100
acquisition and tracking of satellites, determination of the phase
transition of the navigation data, and demodulation and decoding
of the navigation signal to determine the position of the satellite.
The satellites are differentiated by 32 different PRN codes. The
-150
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 1.2 1.4 1.6 1.8 2 code phase is the time alignment of the PRN code in the block of
Frequency (Hz) x 10 6 data being processed. Since the C/A code is of length 1023, the code
phase can vary between 0 and 1022, and all these values must be
Fig. 4. Magnitude of FIR filter frequency response designed in MATLAB. tested to find the phase that produces the exact alignment with the

Fig. 5. Sample GPS output.

 E.A. Thompson et al. / Journal of Network and Computer Applications 35 (2012) 1352–1360
incoming code. Successful satellite acquisition occurs when there is
high correlation between the locally generated PRN code and the
incoming code from the satellite Borre et al. (2007).
To demodulate the signal, the carrier frequency must be
known. If the GPS signal has been downconverted in hardware,
this corresponds to the IF. However, the actual frequency can
deviate from this value up to 710 kHz, due to Doppler shift
(Borre et al., 2007). Thus, all frequencies within 710 kHz of the
carrier or IF must be searched in increments of 500 Hz.
An example of the Borre et al. (2007) output is provided in
Fig. 5, which shows the time domain, frequency domain, and
histogram of a 20 ms portion of the received data. Note that the
Fig. 6. Acquired/not acquired satellites. (For interpretation of the references to
colour in this figure, the reader is referred to the web version of this article.)
Fig. 7. Tracking results for a single satellite.
1357
histogram resembles a Gaussian distribution that would be
expected for random noise.
Figure 6 provides a sample display of the acquisition metrics
for each possible satellite using an FFT-based parallel acquisition
scheme. The acquisition metric is the ratio of the peak in the FFT
profile to the next highest level in the FFT. A satellite is declared
to be detected when this ratio exceeds a fixed threshold. In Fig. 6,
the acquired signals are displayed in green.
Figure 7 is a sample plot for one satellite of the tracking
algorithm output. The upper left hand display is a Time Scatter
Plot of the in-phase (I prompt) and quadrature (Q prompt) output
of the Costas loop used to track the carrier. Note the clusters
around þ1 and  1 for the in-phase signal. This is the resultant
50 bps GPS information. A time plot of the raw I prompt output is
given in the upper right hand graph, consisting of the ‘‘Bits of the
navigation message’’. The middle left plot is the raw output of the
Costas discriminator error output. The bottom left plot is this
signal after passing thru the Costa Loop filter, used to drive the
Costas loop NCO.
The right middle plot of Fig. 7 shows the magnitude outputs
formed by the magnitude of the in-phase and quadrature signal
output of the de-spreader for early, late and prompt times for a
delay-lock loop (DLL), used to time track the navigation informa-
tion. As expected, the prompt magnitude is higher than the early
and late offsets. The bottom middle and bottom right plots are the
raw DDL discriminator and filtered DDL discriminator time wave-
forms, respectively. Note Fig. 7 displays the entire 37 s of the
captured GPS waveform. The initial signal acquisition transients
are evident at the beginning of the signals.
4. Results and discussion
The location coordinates resulting from 10 trials of executing
the modified MATLAB software are provided in Table 2 and are
plotted in Fig. 8. In Fig. 8, results of each of the 10 trials are
1358 E.A. Thompson et al. / Journal of Network and Computer Applications 35 (2012) 1352–1360

Table 2
GPS location results for 10 trials.

Test run Latitude (Time) Longitude (Time) Latitude (Decimal) Longitude (Decimal)

1 411 60 56.531200  851 60 34.376700 41.115703  85.109549

2 411 60 56.582200  851 60 34.341500 41.115717  85.109539
3 411 60 56.670700  851 60 34.811200 41.115742  85.109670
4 411 60 56.327800  851 60 34.671100 41.115647  85.109631
5 411 60 56.650400  851 60 34.249600 41.115736  85.109514
6 411 60 56.637000  851 60 34.228600 41.115733  85.109508
7 411 60 56.794500  851 60 34.574600 41.115776  85.109604
8 411 60 56.348800  851 60 33.272000 41.115652  85.109242
9 411 60 56.521300  851 60 34.037300 41.115700  85.109455
10 411 60 56.837800  851 60 35.022800 41.115788  85.109729

Actual location 41.115817  85.109572

Average 41.1157194  85.1095441
Standard deviation 4.39504E-05 0.000127531
Distance between average and actual location 2.5 m

Table 3
Gain for each component in the system*.

Component Gain (dB)

Active antenna 28.0

58529A Amp/BPF 25.0
LMR400UF Coax Cable  3.2
Bias tee  0.2
S6001 RG-174 Coax Cable  0.3
Downconverter 0
S60301 RG-174 coax cable  0.3
USRP 40.0

n
All components have an impedance of 50 O.

The processing gain, Gp, due to spectrum spreading can be

calculated using Eq. (3) (Maxim, 2010),
 
chip rate
Gp ¼ 10log10 ð3Þ
data rate
where the chip rate is 1.023 MHz, and the data rate is 50 bps.,
resulting in a processing gain of 43 dB. The final equivalent signal
Fig. 8. Plotted coordinates for the 10 trials with the average position in blue and power, Sf, was then calculated to be 2 dBm using Eq. (4).
actual location in green. (For interpretation of the references to colour in this
figure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of this article.) Sf ¼ Si þGp þ Gs ð4Þ

Note that the despreaded signal is not a physical signal, but it

displayed in orange, the average of these is shown in blue, and the is a computed signal having this equivalent signal strength.
actual antenna location is indicated in green. The difference Similarly, the final equivalent noise power was calculated to
between the average of the 10 trials and the actual antenna be 19.96 dBm using Eq. (5),
location was 2.5 m. Nf ¼ Ni þF þ Gs ð5Þ

4.1. System gain
The gain/attenuation of each component of the system was
determined or estimated from its datasheet and is listed in
Table 3. As noted above, the gain of the USRP was programmed
to be 40 dB at the time of data capture. The total system gain, Gs,
was 89 dB.
4.2. System SNR
As stated above, the initial GPS signal power, Si, was -130 dBm.
The initial noise power, Ni, was thermal noise, calculated using
Eq. (2) (Noise Figure, 2010).
Ni ¼ kTB ¼ 110:97 dBm
Here, k is Boltzmann’s constant, T is the noise temperature
(290 K), and B is bandwidth, approximated as 2 MHz. Thus, the
input SNR is calculated to be  19.03 dB.
where F is the total noise figure of the system, estimated to be
that of the antenna amplifier, 2 dB. Thus, the final SNR can be
computed to be approximately 22 dB.
4.3. Quantization of the stored GPS signal
The question arose as to the acceptable quantization of the
stored waveform used as input into the Borre software. Since the
input signal looks Gaussian in nature, as evidenced by the
histogram plot of Fig. 5, an analysis of the quantization effects
was made. For uniform symmetric quantization, the minimum
mean squared error for Gaussian input data has been well-
documented in Jayant and Noll (1984).
An estimate of the receiver signal-to-noise ratio at time index k
ð2Þ
(SNR(k)) is computed as the output power of the receiver software
despreader with samples I(n) and Q(n) divided by the wideband input
power samples S(n) over multiple bit times (Van Dierendonck and
Braasch, 1999; IF GPS Signal Simulator Development and Verification,
 E.A. Thompson et al. / Journal of Network and Computer Applications 35 (2012) 1352–1360 1359

2003; Sayer, 2003). Thus 22.5

0 12 8B
XM 4B
WBPðkÞ ¼ @ Sðj þ kÞA ð6Þ 22 3B
j¼1 2B
1B
0 12 0 12
X
M X
M 21.5
NBPðkÞ ¼ @ Iðj þ kÞA þ @ Q ðj þ kÞA ð7Þ

j¼1 j¼1
 
NBPðkÞ
SNRest ðkÞ ¼
WBPðkÞ
where SðkÞ is the kth input sample to the Borre software and where
I(j) and Q(j) are the in-phase (I) and quadrature (Q) input samples
computed as the downconverted, and despreader output. That is, I
and Q are the mixed output of a local oscillator sine and cosine signals
used to downconvert the input signal to baseband and which have
been despread by the satellite’s spreading signal, PRNsat(j), which is a
binary (þ 1/ 1) signal modulated at the chipping rate of 1.024 MHz.
Thus, the I(k) and Q(k) are computed as
IðkÞ ¼ cosðcarrier angleðkÞÞUPRNsatðkÞUSðkÞ
Q ðkÞ ¼ sinðcarrier angleðkÞÞUPRNsatðkÞUSðkÞ
Here the carrier angle(k) is the angle of the local oscillator used to
downconvert the signal which is phase locked to the angle of the
input signal. The PRNsat(k) sequence is the chipping sequence which
has been phase locked to the received spreading sequence of the
satellite.
Figures 9 and 10 show the SNR(k) as a function of time for the
two satellites with the highest SNR levels. The estimated SNR
levels compare well to the SNR level of 22 dB calculated in Section
4.2. The MATLAB file tracking.m of the Borre et al. (2007) software
was modified to compute an SNR averaged over 100 bits or 2 s.
After removing the startup transients in this data, the mean
value of SNR has computed over the last 30 s for various number
of quantization levels. As shown in Table 4, the measured SNR
resulting from the increase in quantization noise closely follows
that predicted by theory. As shown in the table, if the signal were
quantized with 4 bits, the SNR decrease is negligible (0.0497 dB
theoretically). For 3 bits, the SNR decrease is only 0.1595 dB. For
2 bits quantization, the SNR degradation is only about 0.5 dB.
Only when one bit quantization is used, the measured SNR drops
by 1.83 dB, which is more than the expected 1.345 dB. This
23.5
23
22.5
SNR in dB
SNR in dB
21
ð8Þ
20.5
20
19.5
5 10 15 20 25 30 35
Time in Seconds
Fig. 10. SNR for satellite PRN 21 as a function of time at 2-bit, 3-bit, and 8-bit
ð9Þ quantization. (For interpretation of the references to colour in this figure legend,
the reader is referred to the web version of this article.)
ð10Þ
increase in noise can be attributed to issues of Doppler estimation
and tracking which are made worse by decreasing the SNR. These
SNR calculations were computed using a reference SNR defined
using 8 bits quantization, which was found to have almost
identical SNR to that of 16 bit quantization.
5. Conclusions
Software Defined Radio is a rapidly evolving technology that is
generating widespread interest in the receiver industry. In this
paper, a novel approach has been introduced to implement a non-
real-time software-defined GPS receiver using a USRP platform
and GNU radio software. The system was designed, built, and
tested, and used to acquire and process real GPS signals. The
system gain and SNR were calculated and determined. The system
was subsequently used to determine the SNR resulting from
various uniform quantization levels of the input signal.
The USRP is an effective platform for implementing a software-
defined GPS receiver. It is also a platform on which to simulate
and test GPS algorithms. The book by Borre et al. (2007) with the
8B accompanying MATLAB software was ideal for academic use
4B because it describes the GPS signal and explains operation of
3B the software. The MATLAB software was found to be easy to use,
2B
understand and modify.
1B
One issue with non-real-time processing is that it requires the
signal to be stored and retrieved from disk. This allows for replay

of the captured signal and experimentation with a variety of

22 processing algorithms but has the disadvantage of requiring large
disk files. Since the USRP sampled at a rate of 4 million samples
per second with 16 bits quantization for both I and Q components,
21.5 a 640 Mb disk file was required to save 40 s of the GPS signal. As
discussed in this paper, this signal can be quantized to 4 bits per
21 sample with minimum distortion resulting in an 80 Mb signal,
which is 8 times smaller.
Because MATLAB is an interpretive language, its processing is
20.5 slow. It takes a couple of minutes to upconvert the signal,
5 10 15 20 25 30 35 quantize it and store the results back to disk. And it takes several
Time in Seconds minutes to process a 37 s recorded segment of the GPS signal to
Fig. 9. SNR for satellite PRN 24 as a function of time at 2-bit, 3-bit, and 8-bit
compute position location. There are ways to speed up the
quantization. (For interpretation of the references to colour in this figure legend, processing which include compiling the MATLAB code using its
the reader is referred to the web version of this article.) built-in compiler or by hand coding in C processing intensive
1360 E.A. Thompson et al. / Journal of Network and Computer Applications 35 (2012) 1352–1360

Table 4
Effects of Signal quantization on SNR, theoretical and measured.

Number of Theoretical mean Theoretical noise increase Measured SNR for Difference from 8 bit Measured SNR for Difference from 8 bit
quantization Bits square error (linear) (1þ mean square error) (dB) PRN 24 (dB) SNR for PRN 24 (dB) PRN 21 (dB) SNR for PRN 21 (dB)

8 – – 22.78 21.92
4 0.0115 0.050 22.74 0.04 21.88 0.04
3 0.0374 0.160 22.64 0.14 21.78 0.14
2 0.119 0.489 22.30 0.48 21.42 0.50
1 0.363 1.345 20.98 1.80 20.09 1.83

functions such as signal search and dispreading and making them
a MATLAB callable function.
Because the configuration described in this paper has been a
successful platform for research, it will be a starting point for
further work including the implementation of a real-time system.
The focus of this effort will be the quantization of the signal and
the resulting simplifications to the arithmetic processing.
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank Raytheon Company, Fort
Wayne, Indiana, for sponsoring this project.
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