Assessment of the positioning performance and tropospheric delay retrieval with precise point positioning using products from different analysis centers

Abstract

The performance of precise point positioning (PPP) strongly depends on the quality of satellite orbit and clock products. To give a full evaluation of PPP performance with the various publicly available precise satellite orbit and clock products, this contribution comprehensively investigates the positioning performance as well as tropospheric delay retrieval of GPS-, GLONASS-, and Galileo-only PPP with the precise products from eight International GNSS Service (IGS) (i.e., cod, emr, esa, gfz, grg, igs, jpl, and mit) and five multi-GNSS experiment (MGEX) analysis centers (ACs) (i.e., com, gbm, grm, jax, and wum) based on the observations of 90 MGEX tracking stations in a 1-month period (April 2019). The positioning performance in terms of convergence time and positioning accuracy is assessed by coordinate-static and coordinate-kinematic PPP modes, while the tropospheric delay estimation in terms of accuracy is evaluated by coordinate-fixed PPP mode. For GPS- and GLONASS-only PPP with different AC products, the positioning performances are comparable with each other except that with emr, jpl, mit, and jax products. Overall, the positioning performance with cod and com products provided by CODE ranks the first. For Galileo-only PPP, the grm product performs the best. For ZTD estimation, the accuracy derived from GPS-, GLONASS-, and Galileo-only solutions agrees well and the differences in accuracy among different AC products can be negligible.