Estimation Of Global Positioning System Measurement Errors For GAGAN Applications

Abstract

The Global Positioning System (GPS) has been in use for providing positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) services in many parts of the world. There are several errors that affect the positional accuracy of GPS. Prominent among them are ephemeris errors, satellite and receiver clock errors, multipath errors, signal propagation errors such as ionospheric delay, tropospheric delay, and instrumental biases of the satellite and receiver. In this paper, prominent estimation techniques to characterize various GPS measurement errors are reviewed. The GPS data in the Receiver INdependent EXchange (RINEX) format obtained from a Dual frequency GPS receiver is used in this analysis. Among all the errors, ionospheric delay is found to be the most dominant. However, these delay measurements are affected by the satellite and receiver instrumental biases. The instrumental biases exist as the signals at the two GPS frequencies experience different delays inside the satellite and receiver hardware. For estimation of the instrumental biases Extended Kalman filter(EKF) technique is adopted. The user equivalent range error (UERE) obtained due to all the error sources is of the order of few metres. After accounting for various errors, the estimation accuracy is significantly improved.The positional accuracy of the GPS Aided GEO Augmented Navigation (GAGAN) system is basically dependent on ranging errors and the satellite constellation geometry(1). The lineof-sight ionospheric measurements derived from the Global Positioning System (GPS) observables are corrupted by the instrumental biases present in both the GPS satellites and the receivers. The instrumental bias and Total Electron Content (TEC) results (Hyderabad GAGAN station (78.47°E, 17.45°N)) obtained using theExtended Kalman filter technique are presented in this paper. In this work the main focus is towards development of an improved error free approach for aircraft navigation. The existing navigation solutions are based on iterative algorithms and require an initial estimate of the receiver position for computing the navigation solution which is not possible in all conditions. Accurate, reliable and cost effective navigation solution algorithms that suit the Indian geographic area and area of application are proposed in this work. A non-iterative point solution approach algorithm computes the navigation solution based on the available satellite positions and pseudorange measurements(3). The improvement in GPS system has given a feasibility of automated operation of satellite based augmenting system in aircraft navigation can augment GAGAN and improves the positional accuracy of the user. In this paper a communication approach , high, accurate processing using EKF scheme is proposed for GPS aided geo augmented navigation (GAGAN) application. The effectiveness of the proposed approach for higher performance is evaluated under variable conditions.