Adaptive GNSS carrier tracking under ionospheric scintillation: Estimation vs. mitigation

© 1997-2012 IEEE. This letter deals with carrier synchronization in Global Navigation Satellite Systems. The main goals are to design robust methods and to obtain accurate phase estimates under ionospheric scintillation conditions, being of paramount importance in safety critical applications and advanced receivers. Within this framework, the estimation versus mitigation paradigm is discussed together with a new adaptive Kalman filter-based carrier phase synchronization architecture that copes with signals corrupted by ionospheric scintillation. A key point is to model the time-varying correlated scintillation phase as an AR(p) process, which can be embedded into the filter formulation, avoiding possible loss of lock due to scintillation. Simulation results are provided to show the enhanced robustness and improved accuracy with respect to state-of-the-art techniques.