Investigating the contribution of BDS-3 observations to multi-GNSS single-frequency precise point positioning with different ionospheric models

Abstract

Due to the advantages of low-cost and high precision, single-frequency precise point positioning (SF-PPP) plays a vital role in the booming market of the SF global navigation satellite system (GNSS) receivers. With the full completion of the BeiDou global navigation satellite system (BDS-3), its contribution to single-GNSS SF-PPP is worthy of comprehensive exploration. In this study, three SF-PPP models including ionosphere-corrected (IC), ionosphere-free (IF), and ionosphere-weighted (IW) strategies are analyzed, and four ionospheric models including the GPS Klobuchar, BDGIM (BeiDou global ionospheric delay correction model), CNES real-time VTEC (vertical total electron content) and GIM (global ionospheric maps) are used for conducting SF-PPP. As to GPS/GLONASS/Galileo-only IC SF-PPP, its 3D positioning accuracy can be improved by 6.9–11.6 % with the adoption of BDS-3 observations. Similarly, for the IF SF-PPP solution, the corresponding positioning accuracy and convergence time can be improved by at least 17.3 and 38.3 %, respectively. In IW SF-PPP, the convergence performance of the CNES-VTEC-constrained SF-PPP is much better than that of both GPS Klobuchar- and BDGIM-constrained solutions. When using the BDGIM constraints, the horizontal/vertical convergence time of GPS/Galileo + BDS-3 solutions can be shortened by at least 16.5/27.9 % in comparison with GPS/Galileo-only solutions. While for GIM-constrained SF-PPP, the convergence improvement is only shown in the vertical component. In summary, the GIM-constrained SF-PPP with quad-system observations has the best performance, compared to IF solution, its convergence time can be shortened by 82.8 % to 5.5 min in horizontal and 29.7 % to 26.0 min in vertical when converging to 0.3 m. Note that the corresponding improvements in the BDGIM-constrained solution are relatively limited with only 5 %. At present, the quad-system IW SF-PPP has the ability to achieve cm-level fast positioning, with an RMS of 0.06 m in horizontal, showing promising applications in engineering and scientific fields.