This article investigates multicarrier (MC) transmission for next-generation global positioning system (GPS) instead of current spread spectrum signals. A MC code is proposed in this article as an alternative to the coarse/acquisition (C/A) code in GPS. The entire GPS bandwidth for the C/A code is divided into 1,024 subcarrier slots. As per our proposed arrangement, each satellite vehicle (SV) takes up only 42 uniformly spaced and non-overlapping subcarrier slots while approximately occupying the same bandwidth as the C/A code in GPS. In this way, the proposed MC code is proved to attain a 4.73 dB SNR gain compared to the GPS C/A code in terms of Cramer-Rao lower bound for range estimation, which could evidently enhance the GPS receiver's sensitivity. Together with the feature of robustness against multipath effect, the proposed MC code is helpful for urban, tunnel, even indoor and underground positioning. The transmission and reception of the propose MC code is also described, where the range estimation process is explained. Furthermore, the proposed MC code is shown to be robust against narrow band interference. Moreover, the probability of collision between SVs due to Doppler shifts is theoretically analyzed, where the probability of successful positioning is evaluated. Simulation Results show a consistency with our proposed theory.
