Practical simulation of GNSS signals in the presence of ionospheric scintillation

We propose a low complexity technique to generate amplitude correlated time-series with Nakagami-m distribution and phase correlated Gaussian-distributed time-series, which is useful in the simulation of ionospheric scintillation effects during the transmission of GNSS signals. The method requires only the knowledge of parameters S₄ (scintillation index) and σ_Φ (phase standard deviation) besides the definition of models for the amplitude and phase power spectra. The Zhang algorithm is used to produce Nakagami-distributed signals from a set of Gaussian autoregressive processes.