Detection Performance of Polarization and Spatial Diversities for Indoor GNSS Applications

Multipath fading in the form of signal power fluctuation poses a formidable challenge to GNSS signal detection in harsh multipath environments such as indoors. Antenna diversity techniques such as polarization and spatial diversities can be used to combat multipath fading in wireless propagation channels. This paper studies and compares GPS signal detection performance enhancements arising from the spatial and polarization diversity techniques. Performance enhancements are quantified from a theoretical perspective and later verified based on several test measurements in various indoor environments. Enhancement is quantified based on measuring the correlation coefficient values between diversity branches, SNR levels, and computing the level crossing rate and average fade duration. In addition, the processing gain is quantified and the performance of each individual diversity system is evaluated. Experimental results show that, for a given target detection performance in terms of the probability of false alarm and the probability of detection, the required input SNR level to meet the target detection performance can be significantly reduced utilizing the diversity system