Performance analysis of BDS/GPS precise point positioning with undifferenced ambiguity resolution

Abstract

The undifferenced ambiguity resolution has been proved to be an effective method to shorten the initialization of precise point positioning (PPP) solution and improve the positioning accuracy. Several techniques were proposed for undifferenced ambiguity resolution with GPS observations. However, for BeiDou navigation satellite system (BDS), the satellite-induced variation in pseudorange observation changes the characteristics of Melbourne-Wűbbena (MW) combination observation, which leads to unacceptably low fixing rate of undifferenced ambiguity. Besides, the characteristics of satellite-induced variations in BDS observations vary with orbit type of satellite, which should be considered in correction effort. In this paper, the BDS fractional cycle biases (FCBs) are estimated with least-squares estimation method using the float undifferenced ambiguity collected from the network of reference stations. Based on the analysis of weekly stability of widelane FCBs and the distribution of fractional ambiguity parts, it is proven that the satellite-induced variation correction is necessary for the FCB estimation for IGSO and MEO satellites. Contaminated by relatively large orbit error, the ambiguities of GEO satellites should be skipped for ambiguity resolution attempt. Resolving BDS ambiguities in BDS/GPS combined PPP could significantly shorten the time needed for the first correct ambiguity resolution (FCAR). The experiment results of static PPP demonstrate that 90.6% of all sessions accomplish FCAR within 1350s with only GPS observations. Meanwhile, by adding BDS ambiguities to the subset of ambiguity resolution, 91.9% of all sessions accomplish FCAR with only 870s.