Unconventionally Designed Tracking Loop Adaptable to Plasma Sheath Channel for Hypersonic Vehicles
1
Key Laboratory of Equipment Efficiency in Extreme Environment, Ministry of Education, XiDian University, Xi’an 710071, China
2
School of Aerospace Science and Technology, XiDian University, Xi’an 710071, China
*
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Sensors 2021, 21(1), 21; https://doi.org/10.3390/s21010021
Received: 24 November 2020
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Revised: 14 December 2020
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Accepted: 18 December 2020
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Published: 22 December 2020
(This article belongs to the Section Communications)
An aircraft that moves through the atmosphere at hypersonic speed is covered by plasma sheath, which causes random and fast time-varying amplitude attenuation and phase fluctuation in received signals. This paper comprehensively analyzes the mechanism of the amplitude attenuation effects on a traditional phase-locked loop (PLL), which is always ignored in traditional scenarios (such as satellite telemetry and vehicle communication). Simulation results and theoretical analysis showed that traditional PLL does not work reliably for signal carrier tracking with the severe time-varying amplitude attenuation of the plasma sheath channel. In this paper, an unconventionally designed Kalman filter (KF) tracking loop that is aware of phase dynamics and amplitude attenuation fluctuation for hypersonic vehicles is proposed. To introduce time-varying amplitude attenuation into the proposed KF-based tracking loop, the amplitude attenuation is first modeled with an autoregressive model. The statistical characteristics of the amplitude and phase fluctuation are then incorporated into the state equation and observation equation. Simulation results indicate that the proposed tracking loop is stable when the signal-to-noise ratio is −10 dB with the Ka band, even in the most severe flight environment for hypersonic vehicles.
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MDPI and ACS Style
Shi, L.; Yuan, S.; Yao, B. Unconventionally Designed Tracking Loop Adaptable to Plasma Sheath Channel for Hypersonic Vehicles. Sensors 2021, 21, 21. https://doi.org/10.3390/s21010021
AMA Style
Shi L, Yuan S, Yao B. Unconventionally Designed Tracking Loop Adaptable to Plasma Sheath Channel for Hypersonic Vehicles. Sensors. 2021; 21(1):21. https://doi.org/10.3390/s21010021
Chicago/Turabian StyleShi, Lei, Shurong Yuan, and Bo Yao. 2021. "Unconventionally Designed Tracking Loop Adaptable to Plasma Sheath Channel for Hypersonic Vehicles" Sensors 21, no. 1: 21. https://doi.org/10.3390/s21010021
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