Estimation of Ionospheric Delay Influence on the Efficiency of Precise Positioning of Multi-GNSS Observations

Abstract

Currently, Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) are developing at a fairly rapid pace. Over the last years US GPS and Russian GLONASS were modernizing, whilst new systems like European Galileo and Chinese BDS are launched. The modernizations of the existing and the deployment of new GNSS made a whole range of new signals available to the users, and create a new concept  multi-GNSS. Ionospheric delay is one of the major error sources in multi-GNSS observations. At present, GNSS users usually eliminate the influence of ionospheric delay of the first order items by dual-frequency ionosphere-free combinations. But there is still residual ionospheric delay error of higher orders. In this paper we present four different processing scenarios to exclude the higher orders ionospheric delay effects on multi-GNSS Precise Point Positioning (PPP) performance, including: “only GPS” and “GPS+GLONASS+Galileo+BDS” – without/with eliminating ionospheric delay error of higher orders. Dataset collected from one GNSS station BOR1 (Borowiec, Poland) over almost two years provided by multi-GNSS experiment (MGEX) were used for dual-frequency PPP tests with one- and quadconstellation signals. For the second pair of scenarios were used a IONosphere map EXchange format (IONEX) that supports the exchange of 2- and 3-dimensional TEC maps given in a geographic grid. Numeric experiments show that, the results of different pairs of scenarios differ at the submillimeter level. The results also show that the multi-GNSS processing are better than those based on “only GPS”.