Assessment of PPP for establishment of CORS network for municipal surveying in Middle East

Abstract

Nowadays many Continuously Operating Reference Stations (CORS) network were established in the Middle East to improve different municipal surveying. Establishing such geodetic control networks can be a costly business where multiple stations should be occupied simultaneously and post-processed with scientific software. Recently, precise point positioning (PPP) has attracted wide interest because it provides an alternative to precise relative processing due to its potential as a reliable absolute positioning technique operational simplicity. In comparison with common relative GPS techniques, the costs are reduced; because no base stations and no simultaneous observations are necessary. This research investigates the capability of PPP approach to be a low cost alternative to the conventional positioning methods used in coordinates determination of geodetic networks. The GPS data used during setting up Jeddah municipality network were originally processed by Bernese software version 5.0. That GPS data were processed again using PPP approach and comparable investigation was carried out between the coordinates obtained from Bernese software and CSRS-PPP software. The results showed that overall CSRS-PPP solutions agreed with the Bernese solutions, where the Root Mean Square of the difference between the two solutions reaches 2·6 mm in Easting, 2·5 mm in Northing, and 10 mm in Height. The derived centimetre accuracy from PPP approach which is suitable for municipal surveying confirmed that it can be used for establishment of CORS networks.