SBAS-Aided GPS Positioning with an Extended Ionosphere Map at the Boundaries of WAAS Service Area

Abstract

Space-based augmentation system (SBAS) provides correction information for improving the global navigation satellite system (GNSS) positioning accuracy in real-time, which includes satellite orbit/clock and ionospheric delay corrections. At SBAS service area boundaries, the correction is not fully available to GNSS users and only a partial correction is available, mostly satellite orbit/clock information. By using the geospatial correlation property of the ionosphere delay information, the ionosphere correction coverage can be extended by a spatial extrapolation algorithm. This paper proposes extending SBAS ionosphere correction coverage by using a biharmonic spline extrapolation algorithm. The wide area augmentation system (WAAS) ionosphere map is extended and its ionospheric delay error is compared with the GPS Klobuchar model. The mean ionosphere error reduction at low latitude is 52.3%. The positioning accuracy of the extended ionosphere correction method is compared with the accuracy of the conventional SBAS positioning method when only a partial set of SBAS corrections are available. The mean positioning error reduction is 44.8%, and the positioning accuracy improvement is significant at low latitude.