GNSS-to-GNSS time offsets: study on the broadcast of a common reference time

Abstract

We present two different approaches to broadcasting information to retrieve the GNSS-to-GNSS time offsets needed by users of multi-GNSS signals. Both approaches rely on the broadcast of a single time offset of each GNSS time versus one common time scale instead of broadcasting the time offsets between each of the constellation pairs. The first common time scale is the average of the GNSS time scales, and the second time scale is the prediction of UTC already broadcast by the different systems. We show that the average GNSS time scale allows the estimation of the GNSS-to-GNSS time offset at the user level with the very low uncertainty of a few nanoseconds when the receivers at both the provider and user levels are fully calibrated. The use of broadcast UTC prediction as a common time scale has a slightly larger uncertainty, which depends on the broadcast UTC prediction quality, which could be improved in the future. This study focuses on the evaluation of two different common time scales, not considering the impact of receiver calibration, at the user and provider levels, which can nevertheless have an important impact on GNSS-to-GNSS time offset estimation.