FDTD Modeling and Counteraction to Scintillation Effects in the lonosphere
Abstract
This study investigated the Finite Difference Time Domain (FDTD) modeling of ionospheric scintillation effects, which are random perturbations of electromagnetic waves propagating through the ionosphere. Ionospheric scintillation adversely affects satellite communication and global positioning system (GPS) signals. FDTD is a full-wave time-domain technique that can rigorously model electromagnetic propagation in the ionosphere, thus allowing for a better understanding of and design of numerical experiments to combat scintillation. Methods of near-to-near field and near-to-far field transformation were implemented to enable FDTD simulation of scintillation perturbed signals at large distances. These methods were augmented by hash table based sparse data storage and parallelized evaluation to make them usable for an AFRL provided test case scenario of plane wave propagation. Research undertaken evaluated phase detection in FDTD and its compatibility with near-to-near field and near-to-far field transformation techniques needed for extrapolation based range extension. The results obtained indicate it is possible to use these techniques together with a different source implementation. A discussion of future research directions and potential improvements to the current study is also provided.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Apr 05, 2014
- Accession Number
- ADA605172
Entities
People
- Christos G. Christodoulou
Organizations
- University of New Mexico