An Open-Source Software-Defined Receiver for GNSS Algorithms Benchmarking

Abstract

The development of new processing algorithms has always been at the centre of satellite navigation research, aiming to minimize complexity and maximize the quality of the results. Often, these two objectives cannot be achieved simultaneously; thus, identifying the necessary trade-offs are required. Over the last decade, the development of new GNSS constellations offering modernized signals at the cost of higher decoding complexity has led to many new algorithms proposals to decode these signals. Yet, the current research environment suffers from several flaws, namely a lack of interoperability and comparability between algorithms that do not allow a fair comparison between each proposal. Such a problem is the consequence of a lack of open-source solutions, leading to individual in-house software development and dataset acquisition. To address it, we postulate the need to develop an open-source research platform providing common software and reference datasets dedicated to specific environments and user scenarios. We present the current development status and provide a discussion on future developments.