Solar Scintillation Effects on the Deep Space Communication Performance for Radio Wave Propagation Through Non-Kolmogorov Turbulence

Solar scintillation refers to the rapid amplitude fluctuations of the radio signal passing through large-scale coronal irregularities. In this letter, the scintillation index model is first derived to characterize radio wave propagation in coronal turbulence during superior solar conjunction. The proposed model takes into account the non-Kolmogorov turbulence model with the Rytov approximation method. After that, the bit error rate (BER) performance is analyzed based on the proposed scintillation index model, which has instructional significance for deep space communication but still remains largely unexplored. Simulation results demonstrate that the coronal parameters have extensive effects on the scintillation index, and further affect the link BER performance. Our proposed scintillation index model also achieves better agreement with the observation data.