No abstract

ABSTRACT:Rapid convergence of precise point positioning (PPP) solutions to cm-level precision is a key factor for many applications. One means of accelerating this convergence is to exploit the benefit of information on the ionosphere. In order to preserve the integer nature of carrier-phase ambiguities in PPP, it is imperative that ionospheric corrections be provided with a set of compatible satellite phase biases. When using the decoupled-clock model, global ionospheric maps (GIMs) currently provided by the International GNSS Service are not directly applicable to PPP with ambiguity resolution. This paper describes a methodology for incorporating external ionospheric corrections into this model. It is shown that the use of both GIMs and ambiguity resolution can potentially reduce the convergence time of PPP to 10-cm horizontal accuracies from 30 to 4.5 minutes (68 th percentile), while a regional network with inter-station spacing of 150 km can reach this threshold instantaneously under favorable ionospheric conditions.

Techniques enabling precise point positioning with ambiguity resolution (PPP-AR) were developed over a decade ago. Several analysis centers of the International GNSS Service (IGS) have implemented such strategies into their software packages and are generating (experimental) PPP-AR products including satellite clock and bias corrections. While the IGS combines individual orbit and clock products as standard to provide a more reliable solution, interoperability of these new PPP-AR products must be confirmed before they can be combined. As a first step, all products are transformed into a common observable-specific representation of biases. It is then confirmed that consistency is only ensured by considering both clock and bias products simultaneously. As a consequence, the satellite clock combination process currently used by the IGS must be revisited to consider not only clocks but also biases. A combination of PPP-AR products from six analysis centers over a one-week period is successfully achieved, showing that alignment of phase clocks can be achieved with millimeter precision thanks to the integer properties of the clocks. In the positioning domain, PPP-AR solutions for all products show improved longitude estimates of daily static positions by nearly 60% over float solutions. The combined products generally provide equivalent or better results than individual analysis center contributions, for both static and kinematic solutions.