Development of a Real-Time Software-Defined Radio GPS Receiver Exploiting a LabVIEW-based Instrumentation Environment

TL;DR

This paper introduces a real-time GPS receiver platform based on LabVIEW and C/C++, utilizing acceleration techniques and SIMD methods to achieve efficient, portable, and cost-effective navigation solutions, with performance benchmarks demonstrating its effectiveness.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel real-time GPS L1 receiver platform integrating LabVIEW with C/C++ techniques, enhancing portability and performance for SDR-based navigation systems.

Findings

Achieved real-time operation with LabVIEW and C/C++ integration.

Demonstrated portability and compactness of the hardware testbed.

Benchmarks show competitive performance against existing open-source GPS receivers.

Abstract

The ubiquitousness of location based services (LBS) has proven effective for many applications such as commercial, military, and emergency responders. Software-defined radio (SDR) has emerged as an adequate framework for development and testing of global navigational satellite systems (GNSS) such as the Global Position System (GPS). SDR receivers are constantly developing in terms of acceleration factors and accurate algorithms for precise user navigation. However, many SDR options for GPS receivers currently lack real-time operation or could be costly. This paper presents a LabVIEW (LV) and C/C++ based GPS L1 receiver platform with real-time capabilities. The system relies on LV acceleration factors as well as other C/C++ techniques such as dynamic link library (DLL) integration into LV and parallelizable loop structures, and single input multiple data (SIMD) methods which leverage host PC multi-purpose processors. A hardware testbed is presented for compactness and mobility, as well as software functionality and data flow handling inherent in LV environment. Benchmarks and other real-time results are presented as well as compared against other state-of-the-art open-source GPS receivers.