Research of the coverage performance of satellite constellation using visibility function

It is a very important task to estimate the coverage performance of satellite constellation in designing satellite constellation. In this paper, a numeric simulation algorithm of the visibility function is presented and used to evaluate the coverage performance of each satellite in satellite constellation including the time when coverage or gap occurred, the length of each coverage period and each gap period, the time when maximum gap occurred. Based on this, the statistical parameter of the coverage performance of satellite constellation is discussed, and the calculation method is developed. By means of this method, the coverage performance of GPS satellite constellation is calculated, and the constellation visibility graph of GPS is given, and the coverage performance of GPS in different latitude is obtained.