Method of common-view time transfer using communication satellites

Abstract

Chinese area position system (CAPS) can provide positioning, time and velocity service to China region users by renting several commercial communication satellites. We studied a real-time common-view time transfer method in this paper using communication satellites of CAPS. This method can fully use CAPS resources of the communication satellites and orbit determination stations to broadcast the information of timing bias mode parameters from the ground base stations. The timing bias data information can be demodulated and calculated by users from the navigation message by receiving the satellite signal in one-way, so the common-view time transfer process are implemented. This method can provide time service with the accuracy better than 5 ns, which is a kind of high accuracy time transfer method at present. Users can obtain this kind of time services in real-time and only need to receive CAPS time service signal in one-way reception way and without the process of past-data exchange. This paper provides detailed information on the principle of the common-view time transfer method based on communication satellites. Moreover, the experiment platform has been set up to test the performance of this new method. The long baseline experimental results of Xi’an-Kashi and Xi’an-Sanya indicated that the accuracy of CAPS single-satellite is better than that of GPS single-satellite common-view time transfer. The common-view time transfer based on communication satellite can provide time service to users with the accuracy better than 5 ns.