Dr. Sanjeev Gunawardena (right) accepts his Institute of Navigation Fellowship Award alongside other 2024 recipients at the
International Technical Meeting and Precise Time and Time Interval Systems and Applications Meeting
in Long Beach, California in January. (Contributed photo)

Dr. Sanjeev Gunawardena, electrical engineering research associate professor within the Air Force Institute of Technology’s Graduate School of Engineering and Management was inducted as a 2024 Fellow in The Institute of Navigation in January 2024.

“Dr. Sanjeev Gunawardena has been elected for his contributions to the innovation, education, standardization, and proliferation of satellite navigation (satnav) software-defined receiver tools and technology,” an ION press release stated.

“ION has been an essential part of my professional development for these past 23 years. I’m truly honored to be recognized by the wonderful and excellent people that it represents,” said Gunawardena.

“Dr. Gunawardena continues to be a high-impact research faculty member in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He is a dedicated researcher and educator. I am extremely proud to see that he has received the well-deserved recognition of ION Fellow based on his many contributions to satellite navigation and software-defined radios,” said Dr. Ken Hopkinson, the Department Head for Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Air Force Institute of Technology.

The Fellow grade of ION membership was established in 1998 to honor notable members of the Institute who made outstanding sustained contributions to the art and science of positioning, navigation, and timing. Fellows have maintained an observable presence in the ION community over the long-term, including contributions to ION programs and publications.

Gunawardena is widely recognized as one of the world’s leading experts in satnav software-defined radio technology. He designed and developed nearly all of the satnav SDR radio frequency front-ends, data collection systems, and field programmable gate array-based real-time processing engines employed in Ohio University research and flight tests from 1999 to 2014. His collaborative research resulted in the first documented real-time implementation and flight test demonstration of GPS/inertial navigation system deep integration.

A key contributor to Northrop Grumman’s satnav SDRs program, Gunawardena developed a highly flexible and power efficient IP block known as the GNSS Engine for Correlation; used today as part of Northrop Grumman’s Software Enabled Reconfigurable GNSS Embedded Architecture for Navigation and Timing.

In 2012, Gunawardena developed a generic multi-constellation SDR that natively performs enhanced chipshape correlation processing; distributed in the form of a MATLAB toolbox known as ChameleonChips. This tool helped understand the underlying causes behind nominal GPS signal deformation and contributed towards the successful deployment of the operational CAT-1 LAAS. ChameleonChips was also the basis for, and resulted in, the successful ratification of the ION SDR Metadata Standard in 2021 – ION’s second official standard.

Gunawardena has been active in the DoD community as member of the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Navigation Technology Satellite-3 science team where he led the development of prototype waveform generators that influenced NTS-3 payload architectural decisions, and other SDRs adopted to support advanced signals experiments.

Gunawardena has been with AFIT since 2014; serving as a research associate professor of electrical engineering since 2021. While at the Graduate School, he graduated 15 master’s students and is currently advising five doctoral and eight master’s students. He has authored or co-authored two book chapters, 19 journal articles, 20 peer-reviewed conference papers and 57 conference papers. His research areas of interest include: satnav systems including GPS and GNSS, navigation warfare, PNT systems design, satnav signal design and monitoring and digital signal processing. He is a graduate of Ohio University where he earned a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering and PhD in Electrical Engineering.