Innovation Insights: What is a carrier phase?

WHAT IS CARRIER PHASE? The obvious answer is: the phase of the carrier. But this is not helpful if you don’t know what a carrier is. A carrier is basically a harmonic electromagnetic wave — a pure continuous sinusoidal wave with a single constant frequency and amplitude.

Such a wave has limited uses. However, if we modulate or change the characteristics of the wave in some way, then the wave can carry information. Changing the amplitude by using a voice or music audio signal is amplitude modulation as used for AM radio.

Instead, one could modulate a carrier by changing its instantaneous frequency, which is frequency modulation or FM and is used for high-fidelity broadcasting. Yet another way to modulate a carrier is to change the instantaneous phase of the carrier, and that is how GNSS works.

GNSS carriers are phase-modulated by pseudorandom noise (PRN) codes and navigation messages. A GNSS receiver uses the PRN codes to produce the pseudorange observable with a precision in the tens of decimeter range. This is the most common observable for GNSS positioning.

But by stripping away the modulation of the received GNSS signals, the receiver can measure the phase of the underlying carrier. Changes in carrier phase over time reflect the change in the (pseudo)range but are about two orders of magnitude more precise.

One problem with carrier-phase measurements is that they have an initial cycle ambiguity that must be resolved, preferentially fixed to the correct integer value, before they can be used for positioning, but this can be achieved without too much difficulty. While fixing the ambiguity of carrier-phase measurements might be considered a nuisance in GNSS positioning, it can help detect spoofing of GNSS signals where some other techniques might fall short.

In this “Innovation” column, we look at how carrier-phase measurements combined with those from an inertial measurement unit can guard against a deliberate attack on an automated ground vehicle — something that cannot be discounted in our world these days.