A Fully Flexible Methodology for GNSS Receiver Performance Assessment under Ionospheric Scintillation

Radio Frequency (RF) signals are affected by the different media they cross as they propagate through the atmosphere. A well-known phenomenon caused by the ionosphere is the so-called ionospheric scintillation, which affects the received amplitude and phase of a satellite signal. The dispersive nature of these ionosphere events is the reason for the largest source of error in received Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) signals: the effects of scintillation will affect both amplitude and phase of GNSS signals, degrading the quality of the measurements and affecting the expected accuracy. In addition, strong scintillation can cause the receiver to lose the signal lock, thus reducing the availability of the system. Receiver performance under ionospheric scintillation is of special interest for aviation and reference station receivers due to the criticality of the measurements. One of the key elements for the development of robust algorithms is the ability to test the receiver under realistic scintillation conditions. The current work proposes a methodology for receiver testing, mainly based on a combination of real ionospheric scintillation observations and modeled data, combining such inputs in a hardware-in-the-loop testing approach and adding several degrees of configurability. Based on the input configurability and test bench flexibility, different events are injected into the hardware simulator and to the receivers under test. In order to be able to reach probabilities of events at measurement level in the order of 10e-3/hour (such as cycle slips and losses of lock), data has been collected for hundreds of hours and post-processed for collection of various metrics related to Integrity and Continuity of Service (I&CoS). The underlying objective is therefore to validate the proposed methodology for receiver performance assessment under ionospheric scintillation, and demonstrate its applicability under a given test campaign.