Inter-Satellite Single-Difference Ionospheric Delay Interpolation Model for PPP-RTK and Its Positioning Performance Verification

Abstract

In PPP-RTK, obtaining accurate atmospheric delay information for the user through interpolation is one of the keys to achieving high-precision real-time positioning. The ionospheric delay that is extracted by a reference network based on uncalibrated phase delay (UPD) products is often difficult to separate from errors such as receiver code hardware delay and UPD reference error. Inter-satellite single-difference (SD) ionospheric delay information is typically provided to the user. This paper proposes an interpolation model that uses the atmospheric delay coefficient to represent the SD ionospheric delay, based on the mean position of the ionospheric pierce point (IPP) of each satellite pair and the center position of the network, which is called the differenced surface model (DSM). We chose four scenarios to compare the interpolation accuracy of the proposed model with the inverse distance-based linear interpolation method (DIM) and USM based on the difference between the longitude and latitude of the reference and ionospheric pierce point (IPP) of every satellite (here, we call it USM for short). The four scenarios involve a medium-scale reference network with an average distance to the reference station of 41 km, a large-scale reference network with an average distance to the reference station of 98 km, and out-of-network users, and a network with a common minimum of three reference stations. The results show that the root mean square (RMS) of the SD residuals of ionospheric delay for DSM were 1.4, 3.2, 2.2, and 1.4 cm, respectively, for the four scenarios that were considered, which are slightly better delay values than those that were achieved using DIM and USM. For the scenario with three reference stations, the interpolation accuracies of DIM and DSM were no different from those for four reference stations, indicating that the server can still try to provide ionospheric correction service under the condition of fewer reference stations. In contrast, USM could not provide service because it lacked the sufficient number of reference stations. DSM was used as the ionospheric delay interpolation model to analyze GPS and Galileo dual-system PPP-RTK positioning performance. In addition, the atmospheric parameter constraint method of users was used in PPP-RTK in reference networks of different scales. For the 41-km and 98-km reference networks, the time to first fix (TTFF) were 14.5 s and 33.1 s, respectively, and the mean RMS values for the east (E), north (N), and up (U) directions were 0.80, 0.93, and 2.72 cm, respectively, and 1.0, 1.1, and 4.0 cm, respectively, for a period of 5 min after convergence. The fixing rate and positioning accuracy of DSM during the 5-min period were better than those of DIM when the same empirical model was used to determine the mean square error of atmospheric delay.