GPS receiver phase jitter during ionospheric scintillation

The amplitude and/or phase fluctuations in the received signal can severely affect the performance of the Global Positioning System (GPS). These amplitude and phase fluctuations arises when the GPS signal passes through the time-varying electron density irregularities in the ionosphere which can result in loss of lock due to cycle slip in the receiver tracking loop. During cycle slip, the phase jitter serves as an important parameter for updating the receiver tracking loop parameters for efficient tracking either by using a software-based GPS receiver or by hardware modifications. In this paper, a new method of estimating the tracking loop phase jitter is proposed which uses dual frequency based time and spatial variations of total electron content (TEC) at 1 Hz. This method not only involves less computation speed but is also simple to implement compared to the other methods and therefore can significantly improve the performance of the GPS receiver.