A novel approach to ionospheric scintillation detection based on an open loop architecture

Ionospheric scintillation monitoring is becoming an increasing research activity in order to devise countermeasures to the harmful effects ionospheric activity has on positioning services based on Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS). The amount of amplitude fluctuations in GNSS signals due to scintillation is estimated by the S4 index. For this purpose, traditional closed loop architectures are employed in the receiver. In this paper we investigate an alternative measurement parameter based on the Skewness of the histogram of the processed samples. The new metric could relay information akin to that of the S4 and it is estimated on an open loop receiver architecture.