Mitigation of ionospheric scintillation effect using adaptive PID‐based tracking loop in GPS receivers

Abstract

Ionospheric scintillation caused by charged particles results in rapid phase and amplitude fluctuations of a received GPS signal. This obstacle can degrade and disable some signal processing in the GPS sensors. There is a significant interest in the development of global navigation satellite system sensors that can track through scintillations more reliably than current receivers. This study presents an adaptive proportional‐integral‐derivative (PID)‐based carrier loop with a radial basis function (RBF) network identification for robust carrier phase tracking under scintillation circumstance. The incremental PID method that provides lower computational complexity and self‐learning capability is employed to control the carrier loop based on online identification with gradient descent learning algorithms. The RBF network structure is utilised here to perform the system identification and it can be used to predict the Jacobian information of the controlled model in the tracking loop system. The proposed architecture is compared with conventional tracking loops under diverse scintillation strength and loop noise bandwidth conditions. The simulation results show that the authors method indeed achieves better tracking capability in terms of carrier phase average mean square error, phase error standard deviation, and sum absolute error when the severe scintillation conditions are encountered.

Keywords

• ionospheric scintillation effect
• adaptive PID‐based tracking loop
• GPS receivers
• GPS sensors
• global navigation satellite system sensors
• adaptive proportional–integral–derivative‐based carrier loop