Adibeam: Adaptive Digital Beamforming For Galileo Reference Ground Stations

Navigation accuracy and integrity demanded by Galileo and its future evolution motivate the study and design of advance receiving techniques. In that direction, the ADIBEAM project focus on the design of high accuracy ground stations. More specifically, the project deals with the adoption of advance receivers based on the use of arrays of antennas and digital beamforming.In this paper, we present the receiver solution proposed in the project. This solution has been designed aimed at addressing the problems arising when an array of antennas is implemented in practice. Basically, the main problem is the extreme difficult to perfectly control and calibrates all the components of the system. For that reason, a realistic Experimentation Platform has been developed. This platform is based on the software emulation of all the components of the system and the implementation of a GNSS software receiver based on digital beamforming. Concerning the beamforming solutions, robust approaches have been proposed in order to cope with array perturbations.As revealed by the results obtained in the project, the proposed receiver architecture based on the adoption of an antenna array is able to attain code centimetre and carrier millimetre accuracy in challenging scenarios with multipath, interference and scintillation effects.