A new method for satellite selection with controllable weighted PDOP threshold

Abstract

With the development of multi-constellation Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS), more and more navigation satellites are available for position determination. Although the increased number of visible satellites can improve the positioning performance, the computational load to track and process signals from all visible satellites will increase significantly. In practical applications particularly using mobile devices powered by batteries of limited capacity, it will be desirable to track and process only satellite signals that are necessary to meet given accuracy requirement. This requires the development of appropriate satellite selection algorithms. A new satellite selection algorithm with a controllable Weighted Positioning Dilution Of Precision (WPDOP) threshold is developed in this paper. The new approach can be used to select any number of visible satellites with respect to given positioning accuracy. Numerical computations with multi-constellation GNSS data were conducted to assess the performance of the proposed algorithm.