Unconventionally Designed Tracking Loop Adaptable to Plasma Sheath Channel for Hypersonic Vehicles

Abstract

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.