Uncalibrated Phase Delay Research Articles

Assessing IGS GPS/Galileo/BDS-2/BDS-3 phase bias products with PRIDE PPP-AR

Ambiguity Resolution in Precise Point Positioning (PPP-AR) is important to achieving high-precision positioning in wide areas. The International GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) Service (IGS) and some other academic organizations have begun to provide phase bias products to enable PPP-AR, such as the integer-clock like products by Centre National d’Etudes Spatials (CNES), Wuhan University (WUM) and the Center for Orbit Determination in Europe (CODE), as well as the Uncalibrated Phase Delay (UPD) products by School of Geodesy and Geomatics (SGG). To evaluate these disparate products, we carry out Global Positioning System (GPS)/Galileo Navigation Satellite System (Galileo) and BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS-only) PPP-AR using 30 days of data in 2019. In general, over 70% and 80% of GPS and Galileo ambiguity residuals after wide-lane phase bias corrections fall in ± 0.1 cycles, in contrast to less than 50% for BeiDou Navigation Satellite (Regional) System (BDS-2); moreover, around 90% of GPS/Galileo narrow-lane ambiguity residuals are within ± 0.1 cycles, while the percentage drops to about 55% in the case of BDS products. GPS/Galileo daily PPP-AR can usually achieve a positioning precision of 2, 2 and 6 mm for the east, north and up components, respectively, for all phase bias products except those based on German Research Centre for Geosciences (GBM) rapid satellite orbits and clocks. Due to the insufficient number of BDS satellites during 2019, the BDS phase bias products perform worse than the GPS/Galileo products in terms of ambiguity fixing rates and daily positioning precisions. BDS-2 daily positions can only reach a precision of about 10 mm in the horizontal and 20 mm in the vertical components, which can be slightly improved after PPP-AR. However, for the year of 2020, BDS-2/BDS-3 (BDS-3 Navigation Satellite System) PPP-AR achieves about 50% better precisions for all three coordinate components.

GREAT-UPD: An open-source software for uncalibrated phase delay estimation based on multi-GNSS and multi-frequency observations

To meet the demands of precise orbit and clock determination, high-precision positioning, and navigation applications, a software called GREAT (GNSS + Research, Application and Teaching) was designed and developed at Wuhan University. As one important module in the GREAT software, GREAT-UPD was developed for multi-GNSS and multi-frequency uncalibrated phase delay (UPD) estimation. It can provide extra-wide-lane (EWL), wide-lane (WL), and narrow-lane (NL) UPDs for GPS, GLONASS, Galileo and BDS (GREC) satellites for precise point positioning (PPP) ambiguity resolution (AR) in a multi-GNSS and multi-frequency environment. The open-source GREAT-UPD software is written in C + + 11 language following object-oriented principles and can be compiled and run on several popular operating systems, such as Windows, Linux, and Macintosh. Observations from 222 stations spanning days from DOY 091 to 120 were used to conduct multi-GNSS and multi-frequency UPD estimation and PPP AR. Results indicate that GREAT-UPD can generate stable and reliable UPD products with multi-GNSS and multi-frequency observations. After applying the UPD corrections, the multi-frequency GREC PPP AR was achieved with the averaged time to first fix of 9.0 min. The software package can be obtained at https://geodesy.noaa.gov/gps-toolbox , including the source code, user manual, batch processing scripts, example data, and some auxiliary tools.

Using only observation station data for PPP ambiguity resolution by UPD estimation

This article proposes a new method for uncalibrated phase delay (UPD) estimation to improve the accuracy of precise point positioning (PPP), which uses only observation station data. This means that the station used to generate the UPDs is the same station to which they are applied. First, dual-frequency observation equations based on a raw PPP model are developed. Then, the UPDs are calculated from integer linear combinations of float ambiguities. Third, with the UPD corrections, the least-squares ambiguity decorrelation adjustment (LAMBDA) method is utilized to obtain the integer ambiguities. Since only observation station data are used for UPD estimation, the partial ambiguity resolution (PAR) method is adopted to increase the possibility of finding a subset of integer ambiguities. The UPD estimation and ambiguity resolution are performed in each epoch. To obtain the correct integer ambiguity, the ratio test and success rate (bootstrapping) are used to evaluate the estimated integer ambiguity. Finally, by treating the integer ambiguities as constants, fixed solutions can be obtained. Quality control is also applied throughout the entire data processing procedure to obtain high quality float and fixed solutions. Data from 22 stations of the International Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) Service (IGS) in East Asia on day of year (DOY) 206, 2017, are used to verify the feasibility of this method. The experimental results show that compared with the float solution, the proposed method can significantly improve the accuracy in the east, north and up directions by 24%, 21% and 18% for static PPP and 36%, 18% and 34% for dynamic PPP, respectively. However, the accuracy of the proposed method is still lower than that of the fixed solutions obtained by the PRIDE-PPPAR software, in which the fractional cycle bias is computed based on reference network data. These findings sufficiently show that the proposed method can offer better solution accuracy than the float solution. However, the quality of the UPDs estimated only from observation station data is not as good as that of the estimates obtained based on reference network data.

Performance improvement of real-time PPP ambiguity resolution using a regional integer clock

Obtaining reliable GNSS uncalibrated phase delay (UPD) or integer clock products is the key to achieving ambiguity-fixed solutions for real-time (RT) precise point positioning (PPP) users. However, due to the influence of RT orbit errors, the quality of UPD/integer clock products estimated with a globally distributed GNSS network is difficult to ensure, thereby affecting the ambiguity resolution (AR) performance of RT-PPP. In this contribution, by fully utilising the consistency of orbital errors in regional GNSS network coverage areas, a method is proposed for estimating regional integer clock products to compensate for RT orbit errors. Based on Centre National d’Études Spatiales (CNES) RT precise products, the regional GPS/BDS integer clock was estimated with a CORS network in the west of China. Results showed that the difference between the estimated regional and CNES global integer clock/bias products was generally less than 5 cm for GPS, whereas clock differences of greater than 10 cm were observed for BDS due to the large RT orbit error. Compared with PPP using global integer clock/bias products, the AR performance of PPP using the regional integer clock was obviously improved for four rover stations. For single GPS, the horizontal and vertical accuracies of ambiguity-fixed PPP solutions were improved by 56.2% and 45.3% on average, respectively, whereas improvements of 67.5% and 50.5% in the horizontal and vertical directions, respectively, were observed for the combined GPS/BDS situation. Based on a regional integer clock, the RMS error of a kinematic ambiguity-fixed PPP solution in the horizontal direction could reach 0.5 cm. In terms of initialisation time, the average time to first fix (TTFF) in combined GPS/BDS PPP was shortened from 18.2 min to 12.7 min. In view of the high AR performance realised with the use of regional integer clocks, this method can be applied to scenarios that require high positioning accuracy, such as deformation monitoring.

Long-term time-varying characteristics of UPD products generated by a global and regional network and their interoperable application in PPP

The quality and availability of Uncalibrated Phase Delay (UPD) solutions are crucial to the Precise Point Positioning (PPP) service, and the long-term temporal variability and its contributing factors should be better understood. In this paper, we comprehensively investigate the long-term time-varying characteristics of each UPD product respectively generated by a global and regional network and their interoperable application in PPP-AR (ambiguity resolution), the sampling of the WL and NL UPDs are daily and 30 s, respectively. Firstly, in terms of our 30 day Wide-Lane (WL) UPD products of 31 satellites, the Standard Deviation (STD) of each satellite WL UPDs ranges from 0.04 to 0.06 cycles, indicating that the long-term prediction accuracy of satellite WL UPD is sufficient for fixing Wide-Lane ambiguities. Secondly, when a satellite in eclipsing the discontinulity may corrupt the determination of Narrow-Lane (NL) UPD in form of offset, as a result of lacking or poor satellite attitude dynamic modeling. When the influence of discontinuity is removed, the STD of our estimated satellite NL UPDs is less than 0.05 cycles. Thirdly, the STD of our estimated receiver WL UPDs is mainly below 0.2 cycles, which implies that its stability is one order poorer that of the satellite. In addition, if they are used for stations in and around the network covered region, the stability of the UPD products from the CMONOC (Crustal Movement Observation Network of China) is better than that from a global network, benefit from the fact that all the CMONOC stations are equipped with the same receiver type. Finally, the PPP-AR results show that a rate of 82.9% for stations with a WL-ambiguity-fixed rate of over 90% while 69.5% for stations with an NL-ambiguity-fixed rate of over 80% can be achieved when using UPD from the global network, which is worse than that of using UPD from the CMONOC (85.7% for stations with a WL-ambiguity-fixed rate of over 90% while 75% for stations with an NL-ambiguity-fixed rate of over 80%). The results of the experiment on the UPD interoperable application in PPP show that the global network UPD products can provide a fast AR at any single station, and the convergence time is well below 25 min. Particularly, when the location of a station is in and around the regional network, our results show that the PPP results obtained using regional UPDs enable the consistent use of global UPDs. When the location of a station is far away from the regional network, using the regional UPDs can not achieve PPP-AR. Finally, the WL UPDs of the previous day is used for forecasting to estimate the NL UPDs, the stability analysis results of NL UPDs solution and positioning results are demonstrate the validity of forecasted UPD products.

BDS multi-frequency PPP ambiguity resolution with new B2a/B2b/B2a + b signals and legacy B1I/B3I signals

As of December 2019, the core constellation of BeiDou Navigation Satellite System with global coverage (BDS-3) has been fully deployed with 24 MEO, 3 IGSO and 1 GEO satellites. In addition to the legacy B1I and B3I signals, BDS-3 satellites are capable of transmitting several new navigation signals, including B1C, B2a, B2b and B2a + b. The multi-frequency signals of BDS-3 bring new opportunities for fast ambiguity resolution (AR) of BDS precise point positioning (PPP). In this contribution, the BDS five-frequency PPP AR method was developed and the benefits of BDS-3 multi-frequency signals for precise positioning were investigated. The multi-frequency uncalibrated phase delay (UPD) products were estimated firstly using observations from 222 Multi-GNSS Experiment stations. The extra-wide-lane, wide-lane and narrow-lane UPDs of BDS-3 exhibit high stability with standard deviations less than 0.1 cycle. With the derived UPD products, five-frequency PPP AR was conducted at 12 static stations and a moving vehicle. The time to first fix of BDS PPP AR was shortened to 25.5 min with multi-frequency observations, showing improvement of 25.4% when compared to dual-frequency PPP AR. Moreover, instantaneous PPP wide-lane ambiguity resolution (WAR) can be achieved with success rate of over 90%. A fast decimeter-level accuracy can be achieved for BDS five-frequency PPP WAR with positioning accuracy improved by 68%-82% compared to PPP float solutions. The vehicle-borne experiment further demonstrates that BDS PPP WAR is potential to maintain decimeter-level positioning accuracy even in a complex environment.

Benefits of combining GPS and GLONASS for measuring ocean tide loading displacement

GPS has been used to estimate ocean tide loading (OTL) height displacement amplitudes to accuracies of within 0.5 mm at the M2 frequency, but such estimation has been problematic at luni-solar K2 and K1 frequencies because they coincide with the GPS orbital period and revisit period, leading to repeating multipath and satellite orbit errors. We therefore investigate the potential of using the GLONASS constellation (with orbital period 11.26 h and true site revisit period of 8 sidereal days distinct from K2 and K1) for OTL displacement estimation, analysing 3–7 years of GPS and GLONASS data from 49 globally distributed stations. Using the PANDA software in kinematic precise point positioning mode with float ambiguities, we demonstrate that GLONASS can estimate OTL height displacement at the M2, N2, O1 and Q1 lunar frequencies with similar accuracy to GPS: 95th percentile agreements of 0.6–1.3 mm between estimated and FES2014b ocean tide model displacements. At the K2 and K1 luni-solar frequencies, 95th percentile agreements between GPS estimates and model values of 3.9–4.4 mm improved to 2.0–2.8 mm using GLONASS-only solutions. A combined GPS+GLONASS float solution improves accuracy of the lunar OTL constituents and P1 (but not significantly for K1 or K2) compared with a single-constellation solution and results in hourly-to-weekly spectral noise very similar to a GPS ambiguity-fixed solution, but without needing uncalibrated phase delay information. GLONASS estimates are more accurate at higher compared with lower latitudes because of improved satellite visibility, although this can be countered by using a lower elevation cut-off angle.

GPS\u2009+\u2009Galileo\u2009+\u2009BeiDou precise point positioning with triple-frequency ambiguity resolution

Along with the rapid development of GNSS, not only BeiDou, but also Galileo, and the newly launched GPS satellites can provide signals on three frequencies at present. To fully take advantage of the multi-frequency multi-system GNSS observations on precise point positioning (PPP) technology, this study aims to implement the triple-frequency ambiguity resolution (AR) for GPS, Galileo, and BeiDou-2 combined PPP using the raw observation model. The processing of inter-frequency clock bias (IFCB) estimation and correction in the context of triple-frequency PPP AR has been addressed, with which the triple-frequency uncalibrated phase delay (UPD) estimation is realized for real GPS observations for the first time. In addition, the GPS extra-wide-line UPD quality is significantly improved with the IFCB correction. Because of not being contaminated by the IFCB, the raw UPD estimation method is directly employed for Galileo which currently has 24 satellites in operation. An interesting phenomenon is found that all Galileo satellites except E24 have a zero extra-wide-lane UPD value. With the multi-GNSS observations provided by MGEX covering 15 days, the positioning solutions of GPS + Galileo + BeiDou triple-frequency PPP AR have been conducted and analyzed. The triple-frequency kinematic GNSS PPP AR can achieve an averaged 3D positioning error of 2.2 cm, and an averaged convergence time of 10.8 min. The average convergence time can be reduced by triple-frequency GNSS PPP AR by 15.6% compared with dual-frequency GNSS PPP AR, respectively. However, the additional third frequency has only a marginal contribution to positioning accuracy after convergence.

Algorithm and Assessment of Ambiguity-Fixed PPP with BeiDou Observations and Regional Network Augmentation

AbstractIn precise point positioning (PPP) applications, uncalibrated phase delays (UPD) are applied to retrieve the ambiguity integers for achieving precise solutions over a short period. Also, th...

Evaluation of PPP-RTK based on BDS-3/BDS-2/GPS observations: a case study in Europe

The Chinese BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS) transited from regional (Asia–Pacific) to global on December 28, 2018. In this study, the performance of PPP-RTK based on BDS-3/BDS-2/GPS observations is analyzed by utilizing the observations in Europe during a calm ionospheric disturbance period with Kp-index ranging from 0o to 2-. Satellite clock offsets are first estimated and then fixed to determine the uncalibrated phase delays (UPDs) and the ionospheric/tropospheric information from the reference network. Real-time PPP and PPP AR based on raw observations are estimated at the user, in which atmospheric constraints are imported as virtual observations if available. Analysis results based on 3 days of observations reveal that centimeter-level positioning accuracy can be achieved based on GPS, BDS, or GPS + BDS observations, and the performance can be further improved by realizing PPP AR. The satellite-differenced ionospheric and tropospheric information can be predicted for the users with an accuracy of 24.6 mm and 5.6 mm, respectively. Augmented by the predicted atmospheric information, PPP-RTK can be realized based on GPS- or BDS-only observations, and the average number of epochs required for ambiguity fixing is 1.5 and 1.6, respectively. The RMS values of the positioning errors of the north, east, and up components based on GPS-only observations are 8.0, 4.7, and 19.7 mm, while 9.8, 7.3, 29.7 mm, respectively, based on BDS-only observations. Utilizing GPS and BDS observations together, the average number of epochs required decreases to 1.2, and the positioning errors become 5.6, 3.5, and 23.3 mm for the north, east, and up components, respectively. All these results suggest that BDS can provide high-accuracy positioning services independently for users in Europe. Although a small decrease in the positioning accuracy of the up component, which might be attributed to inappropriate weighting strategy between satellite systems and requires further researches in the future, the additional BDS observations can improve the performance in the time to the first fixed solution and the positioning accuracies with respect to GPS-only positioning. The performance of PPP-RTK based on BDS-3/BDS-2/GPS observations during medium and high ionospheric disturbance periods will also be estimated in the future to fully evaluate the effects of additional BDS-3 observations in high-accuracy GNSS applications.

Galileo PPP rapid ambiguity resolution with five-frequency observations

Galileo, transmitting signals on the five frequencies E1, E5a, E5b, E5 and E6, has completed the fundamental constellation with 26 satellites and now can provide the global positioning service independently. Multi-frequency (triple-frequency or above) signals allow a variety of combinations on different frequencies, which has the potential to improve the performance of the precise point positioning (PPP) ambiguity resolution (AR). We developed a multi-frequency PPP AR method to make use of the Galileo five-frequency observations. The stable multi-frequency uncalibrated phase delay (UPD) products of Galileo were estimated first. It is interesting to find that the extra-wide-lane (EWL) UPDs on the E5a/E5b, E5a/E5 and E5/E5b combined frequencies are very close to zero. With the obtained UPD products, the Galileo triple-, quad- and five-frequency PPP AR was conducted. Triple-frequency PPP AR with different frequency combinations can improve the positioning accuracy of 30 min by 36.6–86.8% compared with float solutions, and 2.3–62.5% compared with dual-frequency PPP AR. Among the five types of frequency combinations, the triple-frequency PPP AR on E1/E5/E6 frequencies shows the best positioning performance with the averaged convergence time shortened to 16.9 min. Furthermore, the averaged convergence time is 15.3 min and 15.0 min for quad- and five-frequency PPP AR, respectively. Compared with the time to first fix (TTFF) of 19.9 min for narrow-lane ambiguity resolution with dual-frequency observations, the TTFF is only shortened by about 1 min with multi-frequency observations. It is beneficial that the EWL and wide-lane (WL) ambiguities can be fixed to integers instantaneously, and the decimeter-level positioning accuracy can be achieved within 0.5 min by utilizing triple-/quad-/five-frequency PPP wide-lane AR (WAR). Moreover, the positioning accuracy of the first epoch derived from Galileo five-frequency PPP WAR is (0.112, 0.144, 0.641) m in the east, north and up components, which has an improvement of 2.1–42.0% compared to triple-/quad-frequency PPP WAR.

Real-Time Kinematic Precise Orbit Determination for LEO Satellites Using Zero-Differenced Ambiguity Resolution

The rapid growing number of earth observation missions and commercial low-earth-orbit (LEO) constellation plans have provided a strong motivation to get accurate LEO satellite position and velocity information in real time. This paper is devoted to improve the real-time kinematic LEO orbits through fixing the zero-differenced (ZD) ambiguities of onboard Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) phase observations. In the proposed method, the real-time uncalibrated phase delays (UPDs) are estimated epoch-by-epoch via a global-distributed network to support the ZD ambiguity resolution (AR) for LEO satellites. By separating the UPDs, the ambiguities of onboard ZD GPS phase measurements recover their integer nature. Then, wide-lane (WL) and narrow-lane (NL) AR are performed epoch-by-epoch and the real-time ambiguity–fixed orbits are thus obtained. To validate the proposed method, a real-time kinematic precise orbit determination (POD), for both Sentinel-3A and Swarm-A satellites, was carried out with ambiguity–fixed and ambiguity–float solutions, respectively. The ambiguity fixing results indicate that, for both Sentinel-3A and Swarm-A, over 90% ZD ambiguities could be properly fixed with the time to first fix (TTFF) around 25–30 min. For the assessment of LEO orbits, the differences with post-processed reduced dynamic orbits and satellite laser ranging (SLR) residuals are investigated. Compared with the ambiguity–float solution, the 3D orbit difference root mean square (RMS) values reduce from 7.15 to 5.23 cm for Sentinel-3A, and from 5.29 to 4.01 cm for Swarm-A with the help of ZD AR. The SLR residuals also show notable improvements for an ambiguity–fixed solution; the standard deviation values of Sentinel-3A and Swarm-A are 4.01 and 2.78 cm, with improvements of over 20% compared with the ambiguity–float solution. In addition, the phase residuals of ambiguity–fixed solution are 0.5–1.0 mm larger than those of the ambiguity–float solution; the possible reason is that the ambiguity fixing separate integer ambiguities from unmodeled errors used to be absorbed in float ambiguities.

An overview on GNSS carrier-phase time transfer research

global navigation satellite system (GNSS) carrier phase observations are two orders of higher accuracy than pseudo-range observations, and they are less affected by multipath besides. As a result, the time transfer accuracy can reach 0.1 ns, and the frequency transfer stability can reach 1×10−15 with carrier phase (CP) method, therefore CP method is considered the most accurate and promising time transfer technology. The focus of this paper is to present a comprehensive summary of CP method, with specific attention directed toward day-boundary clock jump, ambiguity resolution (AR), multi-system time transfer and real-time time transfer. Day-boundary clock jump is essentially caused by pseudo-range noise. Several approaches were proposed to solve the problem, such as continuously processing strategy, sliding batch and bidirectional filtering methods which were compared in this study. Additionally, researches on AR in CP method were introduced. Many scholars attempted to fix the single-difference ambiguities to improve the time transfer result, however, owing to the uncalibrated phase delay (UPD) was not considered, the current studies on AR in CP method were still immature. Moreover, because four GNSS systems could be used for time-transfer currently, which was helpful to increase the accuracy and reliability, the researches on multi-system time transfer were reviewed. What’s more, real-time time transfer attracted more attention nowadays, the preliminary research results were presented.

A modified phase clock/bias model to improve PPP ambiguity resolution at Wuhan University

Precise point positioning ambiguity resolution (PPP-AR) is a valuable tool for high-precision geodetic observations, while phase bias products are critical to implementing GNSS PPP-AR. Based on the conventional integer clock and uncalibrated phase delay (UPD) models, we proposed a modified phase clock/bias model to enable undifferenced ambiguity fixing where it is the phase clocks, rather than the International GNSS Service (IGS) legacy clocks, which are estimated in a network solution by first correcting carrier-phase data for both pre-resolved integer ambiguities and predetermined phase biases. Such phase clock/bias product is compatible with IGS legacy clock and code bias products as opposed to the integer clock model, while ensuring more accurate daily positions in contrast to the UPD model. We carried out precise point positioning (PPP) ambiguity fixing using 1 year of GPS data from about 500 stations and took the IGS weekly solutions as benchmarks: The phase clock/bias model reproduced the positioning achievement of the integer clock model without biasing pseudorange processing, whereas improving markedly the east component of daily positions by 20% compared to the UPD model; interestingly, negligible differences exist between the UPD-based hourly positions and those based on the phase clock/bias model, corroborating that the UPD model is a good approximation to the phase clock/bias model in case of short observation periods. Finally, since phase biases are linearly dependent on clocks, we suggest to compute daily phase bias products, instead of the usual 15-min UPDs, by driving all their temporal variations to the phase clocks, which will greatly facilitate ambiguity-fixed PPP (ftp://igs.gnsswhu.cn/pub/whu/phasebias).

Calibration of BeiDou Triple-Frequency Receiver-Related Pseudorange Biases and Their Application in BDS Precise Positioning and Ambiguity Resolution.

Global Navigation Satellite System pseudorange biases are of great importance for precise positioning, timing and ionospheric modeling. The existence of BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS) receiver-related pseudorange biases will lead to the loss of precision in the BDS satellite clock, differential code bias estimation, and other precise applications, especially when inhomogeneous receivers are used. In order to improve the performance of BDS precise applications, two ionosphere-free and geometry-free combinations and ionosphere-free pseudorange residuals are proposed to calibrate the raw receiver-related pseudorange biases of BDS on each frequency. Then, the BDS triple-frequency receiver-related pseudorange biases of seven different manufacturers and twelve receiver models are calibrated. Finally, the effects of receiver-related pseudorange bias are analyzed by BDS single-frequency single point positioning (SPP), single- and dual-frequency precise point positioning (PPP), wide-lane uncalibrated phase delay (UPD) estimation, and ambiguity resolution, respectively. The results show that the BDS SPP performance can be significantly improved by correcting the receiver-related pseudorange biases and the accuracy improvement is about 20% on average. Moreover, the accuracy of single- and dual-frequency PPP is improved mainly due to a faster convergence when the receiver-related pseudorange biases are corrected. On the other hand, the consistency of wide-lane UPD among different stations is improved significantly and the standard deviation of wide-lane UPD residuals is decreased from 0.195 to 0.061 cycles. The average success rate of wide-lane ambiguity resolution is improved about 42.10%.

Improving real-time clock estimation with undifferenced ambiguity fixing

Real-time clock products are essential and a prerequisite for global navigation satellite system (GNSS) real-time applications, which are usually estimated from real-time observations from reference stations of a ground network without fixing the phase ambiguities. To improve the precision of real-time clock products further, an undifferenced ambiguity fixing algorithm is proposed for the classical real-time clock estimation method without requiring modifications to the current data processing strategy and product consistency. Combined with the wide-lane (WL) ambiguities, the ionospheric-free (IF) ambiguity estimates generated by the traditional clock estimation method are fed to an independent ambiguity fixing process to estimate the WL and narrow-lane (NL) uncalibrated phase delays (UPDs) and fix the WL/NL undifferenced ambiguities at each epoch. The fixed IF ambiguities are recovered from these WL/NL UPDs and integer ambiguities and then used to constrain the float-ambiguity clock solution. The proposed strategy is tested on 30 days of observations of 85 globally distributed reference stations of the international GNSS service (IGS) and multi-GNSS experiment (MGEX) networks. In the experiment, 99.96% of the post-fit residuals of WL ambiguities and 99.31% of the post-fit residuals of NL ambiguities fall in the range of (??0.3, 0.3), with standard deviations (STD) of 0.045 and 0.074 cycles, respectively, which demonstrates the high precision and consistency of UPDs and fixed ambiguities. With the constraint of fixed ambiguities, the traditional float-ambiguity clock solution is further refined, resulting in ambiguity-fixed clock solution. Comparison with the IGS 30?s final clock products shows that ambiguity-fixing brings as much as 50---87% precision improvement to the float-ambiguity clock solution, and with an average improvement over 30?days of 24---50% for each satellite. When used in the float-ambiguity kinematic PPP test, the ambiguity-fixed clock brings at least 5% improvement to the north component and at least 10% improvement to the east and vertical components.

Estimating multi-frequency satellite phase biases of BeiDou using maximal decorrelated linear ambiguity combinations

Improving ambiguity resolution (AR) in multi-frequency undifferenced and uncombined precise point positioning (PPP) benefits from accurate uncalibrated phase delays (UPD), which are often estimated from linear combinations of float ambiguities. The traditional linear ambiguity combinations for estimating these UPDs in case of triple-frequency observations are typically extra-wide-lane, wide-lane, and L1 combinations. We proposed the method for estimating UPDs from triple-frequency ambiguities using maximal decorrelated linear ambiguity combinations obtained by the least-squares ambiguity decorrelation adjustment Z-transformation. To validate the quality and availability of estimating UPDs for the BeiDou navigation satellite system, based on maximal decorrelated linear ambiguity combinations, tests using observations from stations of the Crustal Movement Observation Network of China and the Asia-Pacific Reference Frame project are performed using undifferenced and uncombined PPP-AR. The results show the internal precision of combined satellite UPDs estimated from the maximal decorrelated linear ambiguity combinations is better than that estimated from traditional combinations in terms of temporal stability and RMS of posteriori residuals. Furthermore, the statistical results also demonstrated that triple-frequency PPP-AR using the improved UPDs reduces the average convergence time by 8.9 and 12.3% in horizontal and vertical directions, and also improves the positioning accuracy for 3?h of observations by 11.1, 9.1 and 8.3% in the east, north and up directions, respectively, compared with triple-frequency PPP-AR using the UPDs derived from the traditional combinations.

Multi-GNSS Relative Positioning with Fixed Inter-System Ambiguity

In multi-GNSS cases, two types of Double Difference (DD) ambiguity could be formed including an intra-system ambiguity and an inter-system ambiguity, which are identified as the DD ambiguity between satellites from the same and from different GNSS systems, respectively. We studied the relative positioning methods using intra-system DD observations and using Un-Difference (UD) observations, and developed a frequency-free approach for fixing inter-system ambiguity based on UD observations for multi-GNSS positioning, where the inter-system phase bias is calculated with the help of a fixed Single-Difference (SD) ambiguity. The consistency between the receiver-end uncalibrated phase delays (RUPD) and the SD ambiguity were investigated and the positioning performance of this new approach was assessed. The results show that RUPD could be modeled as a constant if the receiver were tracking satellites continuously. Furthermore, compared to the method using DD observations with only an intra-system DD ambiguity fixed, the new ambiguity fixing approach has a better performance, especially in hard environments with a large cut-off angle or serve signal obstructions.

Investigation and Validation of the Time-Varying Characteristic for the GPS Differential Code Bias

The time-varying characteristic of the bias in the GPS code observation is investigated using triple-frequency observations. The method for estimating the combined code bias is presented and the twelve-month (1 January–31 December 2016) triple-frequency GPS data set from 114 International GNSS Service (IGS) stations is processed to analyze the characteristic of the combined code bias. The results show that the main periods of the combined code bias are 12, 8, 6, 4, 4.8 and 2.67 h. The time-varying characteristic of the combined code bias, which is the combination of differential code bias (DCB) (P1–P5) and DCB (P1–P2), shows that the real satellite DCBs are also time-varying. The difference between the two sets of the computed constant parts of the combined code bias, with the IGS DCB products of DCB (P1–P2) and DCB (P1–P2) and the mean of the estimated 24-h combined code bias series, further show that the combined code bias cannot be replaced by the DCB (P1–P2) and DCB (P1–P5) products. The time-varying part of inter-frequency clock bias (IFCB) can be estimated by the phase and code observations and the phase based IFCB is the combinations of the triple-frequency satellite uncalibrated phase delays (UPDs) and the code-based IFCB is the function of the DCBs. The performances of the computed the IFCB with different methods in single point positioning indicate that the accuracy for the constant part of the combined code bias is reduced, when the IGS DCB products are used to compute. These performances also show that the time-varying part of IFCB estimated with phase observation is better than that of code observation. The predicted results show that 98% of the predicted constant part of the combined code bias can be corrected and the attenuation of the predicted accuracy is much less evident. However, the accuracy of the predicted time-varying part decreases significantly with the predicted time.

Improved PPP Ambiguity Resolution with the Assistance of Multiple LEO Constellations and Signals

The fusion of low earth orbit (LEO) constellation and Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) can increase the number of visible satellites and optimize spatial geometry, which is expected to improve the performance of precise point positioning (PPP) ambiguity resolution (AR). In addition, the multi-frequency signals of LEO satellites can bring a variety of observation combinations, which is potential to further improve the efficiency of PPP AR. In this contribution, multi-frequency PPP AR was achieved with the augmentation of different LEO constellations. Three types of LEO constellations were designed with 60, 192, and 288 satellites. Moreover, the corresponding observation data were simulated with the GNSS observations over the ground stations. The LEO constellations were designed to transmit navigation signals on three frequencies: L1, L2, and L5 at 1575.42, 1227.6, and 1176.45 MHz, respectively, which are consistent with the GPS signals. For PPP AR, the uncalibrated phase delay (UPD) products of GNSS and LEO were estimated first. Furthermore, the quality of UPD products was also analyzed. The research findings show that the performance of estimated LEO UPD is comparable to that of GNSS UPD. Based on the UPD products, LEO-augmented multi-GNSS PPP AR can be achieved. Numerous results show that the performance of single-system and multi-GNSS PPP AR can be significantly improved by introducing the LEO constellations. The augmentation performance is more remarkable in the case of increasing LEO satellites. The time to first fix (TTFF) of the GREC fixed solution can be shortened from 7.1 to 4.8, 1.1, and 0.7 min, by introducing observations of 60-, 192-, and 288-LEO constellations, respectively. The positioning accuracy of multi-GNSS fixed solutions is also improved by about 60%, 80%, and 90% with the augmentation of 60-, 192-, and 288-LEO constellations, respectively. Compared to the dual-frequency solutions, the triple-frequency LEO-augmented PPP fixed solution presents a better performance. The TTFF of GREC fixed solutions is shortened to 33 s with the augmentation of 288-LEO constellation under the triple-frequency environment. It is worth indicating that the 288-satellite LEO-only PPP AR was conducted in dual-frequency and triple-frequency modes, respectively. The averaged TTFFs of both modes are 71.8 s and 55.2 s, respectively. It indicates that LEO constellation with 288 satellites is capable of achieving high-precision positioning independently and shows an even better performance than GNSS-only solutions.