Use of the Karhunen–Loève Transform for interference detection and mitigation in GNSS

Improving the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) receiver robustness in a radio interfered environment has been always one of the main concerns for the GNSS community. Due to the weakness of the signal impinging the GNSS receiver antenna, GNSS receiver performance can be seriously threatened by the presence of stronger interfering signals. In these scenarios, classical interference countermeasures may fail due to the fact that interference detection and removal process causes also a non-negligible degradation of the received GNSS signal. This paper introduces an innovative interference detection and mitigation technique against the well-known jamming threat. This technique is based on the use of the Karhunen–Loève Transform (KLT) which allows for the representation of the received interfered signals in a transformed domain where interference components can be better identified, isolated and removed, avoiding significant degradation of the useful GNSS signal.