Study of the Ionospheric Scintillation Radio Propagation Characteristics with Cosmic Observations

Abstract

The ionosphere has important influences on trans-ionosphere radio propagation. When signals pass through ionospheric irregularities, their amplitude and phase are often attenuated and distorted. In this work, the statistical features of scintillation observed by the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) and low earth orbit (LEO) satellites are investigated with Constellation Observing System for Meteorology, Ionosphere, and Climate (COSMIC) data in solar cycle 24. The amplitude scintillation propagation channel is fitted by the Nakagami-m, α-μ and κ-μ models. The performance is evaluated in terms of root mean square error (RMSE), kurtosis and information entropy. The results reveal that the α-μ model achieves the best performance in all considered scintillation intensities, while the Nakagami-m model achieves better performance under severe scintillation in the GNSS-LEO propagation channels.

Keywords

• ionosphere scintillation
• radio occultation
• scintillation signal propagation