Abstract
<h3>Abstract</h3> Ionospheric scintillation is the physical phenomena affecting radio waves coming from the space through the ionosphere. Such disturbance is caused by ionospheric electron-density irregularities and is a major threat in Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS). From a signal-processing perspective, scintillation is one of the most challenging propagation scenarios, particularly affecting high-precision GNSS receivers and safety critical applications where accuracy, availability, continuity, and integrity are mandatory. Under scintillation, GNSS signals are affected by amplitude and phase variations, which mainly compromise the synchronization stage of the receiver. To counteract these effects, one must resort to advanced signal-processing techniques such as adaptive/robust methods, machine learning, or parameter estimation. This contribution reviews the signal-processing landscape in GNSS receivers, with emphasis on different detection, monitoring, and mitigation problems. New results using real data are provided to support the discussion. To conclude, future perspectives of interest to the GNSS community are discussed.
Highlights
Precise and reliable positioning is nowadays of paramount importance in several mass-market civil, industrial and transport applications, safety-critical receivers, and a plethora of engineering fields
This paper provides a survey on the design of Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) receivers that i) are able to detect ionospheric scintillation events, ii) reliably monitor the ionosphere, and/or iii) are resilient to ionospheric scintillation conditions
Those Ionospheric Scintillation Monitoring (ISM) deployment efforts have led to the development of scintillation models, such as those mentioned in Section II-B, that are currently used in the development of detection and mitigation algorithms for GNSS receivers, as well as to better understand the physics behind the ionospheric scintillation process
Summary
Precise and reliable positioning is nowadays of paramount importance in several mass-market civil, industrial and transport applications, safety-critical receivers, and a plethora of engineering fields. Carrier-phasebased positioning, being either differential, such as realtime-kinematic (RTK), or stand-alone, such as precise-pointpositioning (PPP), provides a tremendous improvement in accuracy and can result in positioning errors of less than one centimeter Achieving this requires high accuracy carrier-phase tracking, which can be very challenging under ionospheric scintillation conditions. For space weather monitoring, there has been a trend towards vector receivers and beyond this to open-loop processing, wherein the static receiver fully exploits knowledge of the location, clock, and satellite orbital parameters to reduce the overall tracking uncertainty In this situation, the primary goal of a receiver is to extract information (typically off-line) about the scintillation process rather than achieving a robust position solution. The focus is on the statistical signal processing and learning aspects of those receivers
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