Sinc interpolation based method for compensation of ionospheric dispersion effects on BOC signals with high subcarrier rate

Binary Offset Carrier (BOC) signals with high subcarrier rate such as AltBOC(15,10) and cos-BOC(15,2.5) have been adopted for the next generation of Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) to make full use of the allocated spectrum. However, the two main lobes of the BOC signals are tremendously separated in the frequency spectrum and the group delay of the two lobes are greatly dispersed due to ionospheric dispersion. The signals will suffer extremely severe distortion caused by the group delay dispersion including waveform ripples, power losses and correlation function asymmetries. In this paper, a novel time domain sinc interpolation based ionospheric dispersion compensation method is proposed to eliminate the distortion to the BOC signals. Firstly, the time domain model of BOC signal under the dispersive ionosphere is developed. Afterwards, based on the model, the two signal main lobes are aligned by sinc interpolation so that the ionospheric dispersion effects are almost mitigated. Taking Galileo E5 AltBOC(15,10) signal as an example, the performance of the proposed method is evaluated by simulation and test. The results show that the proposed method is able to more effectively compensate the ionospheric dispersion with fewer computational loads versus existing methods.