Comprehensive BDS-3 Signal Simulating for Strong Ionospheric Scintillation Studies

The construction of BeiDou Global Navigation Satellite System (BDS-3) is near complete and ready to provide worldwide navigation services soon. As compared to other navigation systems, BDS-3 has superiority that it is the first navigation system fully broadcast triple band signals and utilizes more advanced modulation, i.e. Binary-Offset-Carrier (BOC) modulation to achieve the enhanced accuracy and anti-interference performances. BDS-3 will play an important role in various high precision navigation applications. However, strong ionosphere scintillation will pose a great threat to GNSS accuracy and robustness and BDS-3 has no exceptions. Strong ionospheric scintillations will cause severe signal fluctuations, i.e. simultaneous deep amplitude fading and fast phase fluctuations. It will deteriorate the range measurement accuracy, affect the PNT (positioning, navigation, and timing) performances, and even destroy receiver functioning in some extremely cases. Therefore, the investigation of ionospheric scintillation effects on GNSS signals, especially on novel BDS-3 signals are quite necessary. In this paper, a comprehensive study of a strong scintillation BDS simulator will be carried on the basis of an open source GPS scintillation simulator provided by the SenSe Lab in University of Colorado Boulder using the two-dimensional two-component power-law phase screen theory. The BOC modulation is implemented and integrated in the simulator, so that the raw data of six BDS scintillation signals on three frequency bands, i.e. B1I, B1C (data + pilot), B2a (data + pilot), and B3I are simulated for test. To validate the effectiveness of the signal simulator, the realistic BDS scintillation data was collected, analyzed, and compared with the simulator outputs. The comprehensive simulator presented in this paper will be a tool to facilitate the ionospheric studies as well as advanced GNSS receiver development in future.