On trading the spreading gain with the coding rate and its application to GNSS data component design

The ubiquity of global navigation satellite system (GNSS)-based positioning and timing services is often frustrated by the necessity to operate in harsh environments, where the carrier-to-noise ratio is low, and hence, decoding of navigation data and even tracking of an acquired symbol are difficult. We consider the possibility of improving the decoding performance of the GNSS data component by trading the spreading gain against the coding rate. The rationale is that spreading codes can be seen as a form of repetition coding that can be (at least partially) replaced by more robust coding forms to improve robustness to (any form of) noise. This is true both for the classical additive white Gaussian noise channel case and for more realistic GNSS channel formats severely degraded by multiple access interference and near-far effects. By bringing results on finite-block-length channel capacity and coding rates from information/communication theory to the GNSS domain, we are able to establish and discuss the expected performance gap, as well as the limits of such tradeoff.