Extracting Ionosphere Scintillations Index Based on Single Frequency GPS Software Receiver

Abstract

Scintillations are caused by ionospheric plasma-density irregularities and can lead to signal power fading, loss of lock of the carrier tracking loop in the GPS receiver. The traditional method of monitoring and mitigating scintillation is to transform commercial GPS receiver with modified hardware and embedded software. To better facilitate advance development GPS receiver under different condition, GPS software scintillation receiver is designed in this paper. The hardware scheme of high-speed GPS signal acquisition system is first discussed and implemented with FPGA and DSP architecture. Then, we describe receiver software processing algorithm, particularly the portion involving the scintillation signal acquisition and tracking, ionospheric scintillation index extracting and scintillation monitoring. The performance of software receiver is demonstrated under scintillation conditions. Relevant results show that software-receiver based approach can avoid weak signal loss and extract effectively ionospheric scintillation parameter compared with the traditional extracting method. Software receiver is suitable and reliable for the ionospheric scintillations monitoring, and can provide theoretical foundations and experimental preparations for future scintillation studies implemented with Chinese indigenous BeiDou-Ⅱ navigation and poisoning system.