Having given a short overview of GNSS signals and state-of-the-art multi-band front-end architectures, this paper presents a novel contribution to efficient multi-band GNSS reception. A general overlay based front-end architecture is introduced that enables the joint reception of two signals broadcast in separate frequency bands, sharing just one common baseband stage. The consequences of this overlay are analyzed for both signal and noise components. Signal overlay is shown to have a negligible impact on signal quality. It is shown that the noise floor superposition results in non-negligible degradations. However, it is also demonstrated that these degradations can be minimized by judiciously setting the relative gain between the two signal paths. As an illustration, the analytical optimal path-control expression to combine overlaid signals in an ionospheric-free pseudorange is derived for both Cramér-Rao Lower Bound and practical code tracking parameters. Finally, some practical overlay receiver and path control aspects are discussed.
