Wideband SATCOM Model: Evaluation of Numerical Accuracy and Efficiency

Authors

Andrew J. Knisely
Andrew J. Terzuoli Jr., Air Force Institute of Technology

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

8-3-2020

Abstract

The spectral method is typically applied as a simple and efficient method to solve the parabolic wave equation in phase screen scintillation models. The critical factors that can greatly affect the spectral method accuracy is the uniformity and smoothness of the input function. This paper observes these effects on the accuracy of the finite difference and the spectral methods applied to a wideband SATCOM signal propagation model simulated in the ultra-high frequency (UHF) band. The finite difference method uses local pointwise approximations to calculate a derivative. The spectral method uses global trigonometric interpolants that achieve remarkable accuracy for continuously differentiable functions. The differences in accuracy are presented for a Gaussian lens and Kolmogorov phase screen. The results demonstrate loss of accuracy in each method when a phase screen is applied, despite the spectral method's computational efficiency over the finite difference method. These results provide meaningful insights when discretizing an interior domain and solving the parabolic wave equation to obtain amplitude and phase of a signal perturbation.

Comments

© 2020 The Authors.

This article is published by ISPRS, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

Co-author Andrew Knisley was an AFIT PhD student at the time of this article. (AFIT-ENG-DS-21-D-009, November 2021 graduate.)

Sourced from the published version of record cited below.

DOI

10.5194/isprs-annals-V-3-2020-105-2020

Source Publication

ISPRS Annals of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences (ISSN 2194-9050)

Recommended Citation

Knisely, A. J. and Terzuoli, A. J.: WIDEBAND SATCOM MODEL: EVALUATION OF NUMERICAL ACCURACY AND EFFICIENCY, ISPRS Ann. Photogramm. Remote Sens. Spatial Inf. Sci., V-3-2020, 105–110, https://doi.org/10.5194/isprs-annals-V-3-2020-105-2020, 2020.