Performance analysis of BDS/GPS kinematic vehicle positioning in various observation conditions

Abstract

Purpose Global positioning system (GPS) kinematic positioning suffers from performance degradation in constrained environments such as urban canyons, which then restricts the application of high-precision vehicle positioning and navigation within the city. In December 2012, the BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS) regional service was announced, and the combined BDS/GPS kinematic positioning has been enabled in the Asia-Pacific area. Previous studies have mainly focused on the performance evaluations of combined BDS/GPS static positioning. Not much work has been performed for kinematic vehicle positioning under constrained observation conditions. This study aims to analyze the performance of BDS/GPS kinematic vehicle positioning in various conditions. Design/methodology/approach In this study, three vehicle experiments under three observation conditions, an open suburban area, a less dense non-central urban area and a dense central urban area, are investigated using both the code-based differential global navigation satellite system (DGNSS) and phase-based real-time kinematic (RTK) modes. The comparison between combined BDS/GPS and GPS-only vehicle positioning solutions is conducted in terms of positioning availability and positioning precision. Findings Numerical results show that the combined BDS/GPS system significantly outperforms the GPS-only system under poor observation conditions, whereas the improvement was less significant under good observation conditions. Originality/value Thus, this paper studies the performance of combined BDS/GPS kinematic relative positioning under various observation conditions.