High-Precision Modeling for Aerospace TT&C Channels Using Piecewise Osculating Interpolation

Polynomial interpolation is widely used in channel modeling for aerospace tracking, telemetry, and command channel simulators, to accurately regenerate the satellite motion parameters with a high sampling rate from the available low sampling rate motion data. In this paper, a novel piecewise osculating interpolation approach is proposed to improve modeling precision. It uses the available distance and its higher-order derivatives at each pair of adjacent knots to construct the piecewise interpolation polynomial, thus achieving a better precision and continuity of the resulting motion parameters. Moreover, it is efficiently implemented with an interpolation filter based on a modified Farrow structure, and the designed filter can interpolate the motion data obtained both through uniform or nonuniform sampling. Additionally, a sampling optimization algorithm is proposed. It optimizes the motion data sampling by minimizing the maximum interpolation error given the average sampling interval and interpolation polynomial order, and therefore, improves the precision further without increasing the costs. The validity of the proposed approach is verified by numerical simulation, and its advantages are demonstrated by comparison with existing methods.