ION Publishes SDR Metadata Standard in NAVIGATION – Inside GNSS

The Institute of Navigation (ION) announces that the GNSS Software Defined Radio Metadata Standard has been published in NAVIGATION: Journal of the Institute of NavigationSpring 2021, Volume 68, No. 1, pp. 11-20.

The Global Navigation Satellite Systems Standard, defined on radio sample data, is the product of a three-year effort of the standard ION GNSS SDR working group and defines parameters and schema to express the contents of SDR sample data files. The standard promotes the interoperability of GNSS SDR data collection systems and processors.

In the last few years, the spread of software-defined radio (SDR) data collection systems and processing platforms designed or applicable to satellite navigation applications (satnav) has been growing. These systems necessarily produce data sets in a wide range of different formats. In order to correctly interpret this SDR data, basic information such as the form of the packaged sample and the sampling frequency are required. Communicating this metadata between creators and users has historically been an ad hoc, cumbersome, and error-prone process. To address this issue, the satnav SDR community has developed a metadata standard and regulatory software library to automate this process, thus simplifying the exchange of datasets and promoting the interoperability of satnav SDR systems. The standard was ratified and officially adopted as the Navigation Standard Institute in January 2020.

The official citation of the export document can be found at: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/navi.407.