A BDGIM-Based Phase-Smoothed Pseudorange Algorithm for BDS-3 High-Precision Time Transfer

Abstract

Single point positioning (SPP) can meet the requirements of the majority of real-time time transfer applications. Meanwhile, a single-frequency (SF) receiver is cheaper than a dual-frequency receiver. However, SPP performance can be greatly affected by large pseudorange observation noise. Phase smoothing the pseudorange is an effective approach to reduce pseudorange noise. Since the classical phase-smoothed pseudorange algorithm does not account for the effect of ionosphere delay, we propose a BDGIM-based phase-smoothed pseudorange algorithm to eliminate the ionospheric delay and apply it to BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS-3) SPP time transfer. In this paper, we first evaluate the performance of the BeiDou global ionospheric delay correction model (BDGIM) and compare it with that of the BeiDou Klobuchar model to determine if it is practical to incorporate the BDGIM into our suggested method. The performance of the BDGIM is better than that of the Klobuchar model. The mean RMS value of the BDGIM is 2.6 Total Electron Content Unit (TECU). The average ionospheric correction rate of the BDGIM is 75.5%. Then, we investigate the performance of the improved SF SPP time transfer. The performance of the improved SPP time transfer is much better than that of the traditional SPP time transfer. Compared with the traditional time transfer, the average Type A uncertainty of the improved time transfer is 2.08 ns, which is reduced by about 11.1% from the time transfer without it. Regarding frequency stability, the modified Allan deviations of the improved time transfer are 1.43E-12 and 1.68E-13 at 960 s and 61,440 s, with improvements of 51.2% and 59.9%, respectively.