Multiple-Phase Screen Modeling of Ionospheric Scintillation for BeiDou System

Zhijun He, Hongbo Zhao, Wenquan Feng, Xiumei Guan

Peer Reviewed

Abstract:	Irregularities in the earth’s ionosphere are significantly troublesome since they make the amplitude and phase of the radio signals fluctuate rapidly, which is known as ionospheric scintillation. For Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS), severe ionospheric scintillation could cause signal loss of lock, which would degrade the positioning accuracy and affect the performance of navigation system. Draw on the experience of Wide-band scintillation Model (WBMOD) and Global Ionospheric Scintillation Model (GISM), this paper presents a novel model for ionospheric scintillation and discusses the effect on the BeiDou signal phase and amplitude based on the multiple phase screen (MPS) technique. Multiple-phase screen technique is more precise than single-phase screen model and could be applied to the cases with all kinds of scintillation intensity. The whole calculation refers a recursion arithmetic which could be divided into four steps. The first step is to calculate the propagation through one single phase screen. The second step is to calculate the propagation in free space from one screen to the next. After the two stages above, the recursion formula of log-amplitude and phase deviation from one screen to the next can be deduced. Then in the third step, through the recursion formula, the PSD form of log-amplitude and phase deviation on the ground screen can be obtained by Fourier transform. The final step is to generate the fluctuations of signal phase and amplitude numerically on space(time)-domain. This step of calculation is related to the 1-D discrete Fourier inverse transform of the PSD with a sequence of uniformly distributed random numbers. Preliminary results show that the fluctuation of phase and amplitude become stronger when scintillation intensity increases, which coincides with the observation. Subsequently, the paper gives an analysis system on acquisition and tracking performance for BeiDou. The analysis is achieved with detection probability, correlation peak of pseudo code, tracking error variance at the output of PLL, and loss of lock probability.
Published in:	Proceedings of the 2016 International Technical Meeting of The Institute of Navigation January 25 - 28, 2016 Hyatt Regency Monterey Monterey, California
Pages:	573 - 584
Cite this article:	He, Zhijun, Zhao, Hongbo, Feng, Wenquan, Guan, Xiumei, "Multiple-Phase Screen Modeling of Ionospheric Scintillation for BeiDou System," Proceedings of the 2016 International Technical Meeting of The Institute of Navigation, Monterey, California, January 2016, pp. 573-584. https://doi.org/10.33012/2016.13436
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