Evaluation of Carrier Tracking Performance for BeiDou Signals in Presence of Ionospheric Scintillation

Ionospheric scintillation can cause rapid change in the phase and amplitude of BeiDou system (BDS) navigation signals, resulting in degraded accuracy and robustness of signal tracking loops. Compared with the frequency lock loop and delay lock loop, phase lock loop (PLL) is much weaker, and would lose lock much more continually in scintillation. We analyze the variance of PLL for BDS carrier tracking under different scintillation conditions. On the basis of simulation of BDS scintillation signal, we evaluate the carrier tracking performance with different loop order, loop discriminator and loop bandwidth by comparing the phase jitter and probability of loss-of-lock. Finally, we propose the PLI-based bandwidth adaptive carrier tracking algorithm to improve the accuracy and robustness of PLL. Numerical results show that the proposed algorithm has a balanced performance under different scintillation conditions, which can provide helpful reference for the future design of BDS receiver.