Design of a robust receiver architecture for scintillation monitoring

Abstract

Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) signals traversing small scale irregularities present in the ionosphere may experience fast and unpredictable fluctuations of their amplitude and phase. This phenomenon can seriously affect the performance of a GNSS receiver, decreasing the position accuracy and, in the worst scenario, also inducing a total loss of lock on the satellite signals. This paper proposes an adaptive Kalman Filter (KF) based Phase Locked Loop (PLL) to cope with high dynamics and strong fading induced by ionospheric scintillation events. The KF based PLL self-tunes the covariance matrix according to the detected scintillation level. Furthermore, the paper shows that radio frequency interference can affect the reliable computation of scintillation parameters. In order to mitigate the effect of the interference signal and filter it out, a wavelet based interference mitigation algorithm has been also implemented. The latter is able to retrieve genuine scintillation indices that otherwise would be corrupted by radio frequency interference.