Instantaneous BDS + GPS undifferenced NRTK positioning with dynamic atmospheric constraints

Abstract

As the Chinese BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS) has become operational in the Asia-Pacific region, it is important to better understand and demonstrate the benefits of combining triple-frequency BDS with dual-frequency GPS observations for network-based real-time kinematic (NRTK) services. Undifferenced NRTK is a new NRTK service mode, it extends the concept of NRTK by not requiring reference station and specified reference satellite at the rover processing. In order to realize the undifferenced NRTK service, a strategy for real-time modeling the undifferenced (UD) augmentation information is given, in which the fixed double-differenced ambiguities are transformed into UD ones with the help of datum settings. Since this strategy is insensitive to existing ephemeris products, it is applicable to the services of current BDS regional reference networks. Furthermore, a processing scheme for ambiguity resolution (AR) with arbitrary-frequency observations is also presented in detail. An instantaneous and reliable BDS + GPS positioning service can be provided to the rovers in undifferenced NRTK processing mode. With the data collected at 31 stations from a continuously operating reference station network in Guangdong Province (GDCORS) of China, the efficiency of the proposed approaches using combined BDS and GPS observations is confirmed. For three rover stations during days 327–329, a total of 12,960 1-min tests were performed separately to demonstrate the performance of AR. Thanks to the dynamically refined priori information of residual tropospheric and ionospheric error, and the availability of more satellites and observations, the AR fixing rates of combined BDS and GPS systems improve by 13 to 65%, compared with those of the GPS-only system using the traditional WL-L1-IF scheme. The positioning accuracy has also significantly improved.