Anti-Jamming Method and Implementation for GNSS Receiver Based on Array Antenna Rotation

Abstract

Global navigation satellite system (GNSS) array antenna receivers are effective for suppressing wideband jamming. However, its anti-jamming performance decreases sharply when the number of wideband interference surpasses the number of array elements. Since a large number of jammers are often used in navigation countermeasures, it is crucial to keep array antenna receivers available in such conditions. Aiming at this issue, two main tasks were performed in this research and are presented in this paper: Firstly, the direction sensitivity of the sup-freedom anti-jamming performance is revealed and an anti-jamming method for array antenna receivers based on antenna rotation is proposed. Secondly, in order to determine the optimal rotation angle rapidly, a variable-step iteration algorithm based on gradient descent is proposed. Theoretical analysis and simulation show the effectiveness of the proposed anti-jamming method and the efficiency of the implementation algorithm. In a typical airborne scenario with a maximum azimuth difference of 90°, the anti-jamming ability of the proposed method improved by 21~26 dB and 5~10 dB for arrays adopting the PI (power inversion) and MVDR (minimum variance distortionless response) algorithms, respectively. The iterative efficiency improved by 78.35–99.63% in comparison with a traversal of 0.1° search resolution. The proposed method and algorithm are not limited to airborne scenarios and they might be influential to anti-jamming algorithms in the data domain.