Analysis of Factors Affecting Asynchronous RTK Positioning with GNSS Signals

Abstract

For short baseline real-time kinematic (RTK) positioning, the atmosphere and broadcast ephemeris errors can be usually eliminated in double-differenced (DD) processing for synchronous observations. However, in the case of possible communication latency time, these errors may not be eliminated in DD treatments due to their variations during latency time. In addition, the time variation of these errors may present different characteristics among GPS, GLONASS, BDS, and GALILEO due to different satellite orbit and clock types. In this contribution, the formulas for studying the broadcast orbit and clock offset errors and atmosphere error in asynchronous RTK (ARTK) model is proposed, and comprehensive experimental analysis is performed to numerically show time variations of these errors and their impacts on RTK results from short-baselines among four systems. Compared with synchronous RTK, the degradation of position precision for ARTK can reach a few centimeters, but the accuracy degradation to a different degree by different systems. BDS and Galileo usually outperform GPS and GLONASS in ARTK due to the smaller variation of broadcast ephemeris error. The variation of broadcast orbit error is generally negligible compared with the variation of broadcast clock offset error for GPS, BDS, and Galileo. Specifically, for a month of data, the root mean square (RMS) values for the variation of broadcast ephemeris error over 15 seconds are 11.2, 16.9, 7.3, and 3.0 mm for GPS, GLONASS, BDS, and Galileo, respectively. The variation of ionosphere error for some satellites over 15 seconds can reach a few centimeters during active sessions under a normal ionosphere day. In addition, compared with other systems, BDS ARTK shows an advantage under high ionosphere activity, and such advantage may be attributed to five GEO satellites in the BDS constellation.