Analysis of Wide-Lane Ambiguities Derived from Geometry-Free and Geometry-Based Precise Point Positioning Models and Their Implication for Orbit and Clock Quality

The Precise Point Positioning (PPP) technique uses a single Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) receiver to collect carrier-phase and code observations and perform centimeter-accuracy positioning together with the precise satellite orbit and clock corrections provided. According to the observations used, there are basically two approaches, namely, the ionosphere-free combination approach and the raw observation approach. The former eliminates the ionosphere effects in the observation domain, while the latter estimates the ionosphere effects using uncombined and undifferenced observations, i.e., so-called raw observations. These traditional techniques do not fix carrier-phase ambiguities to integers, if the additional corrections of satellite hardware biases are not provided to the users. To derive the corrections of hardware biases in network side, the ionosphere-free combination operation is often used to obtain the ionosphere-free ambiguities from the L1 and L2 ones produced even with the raw observation approach in earlier studies. This contribution introduces a variant of the raw observation approach that does not use any ionosphere-free (or narrow-lane) combination operator to derive satellite hardware bias and compute PPP ambiguity float and fixed solution. The reparameterization and the manipulation of design matrix coefficients are described. A computational procedure is developed to derive the satellite hardware biases on WL and L1 directly. The PPP ambiguity-fixed solutions are obtained also directly with WL/L1 integer ambiguity resolutions. The proposed method is applied to process the data of a GNSS network covering a large part of China. We produce the satellite biases of BeiDou, GPS and Galileo. The results demonstrate that both accuracy and convergence are significantly improved with integer ambiguity resolution. The BeiDou contributions on accuracy and convergence are also assessed. It is disclosed for the first time that BeiDou only ambiguity-fixed solutions achieve the similar accuracy with that of GPS/Galileo combined, at least in mainland China. The numerical analysis demonstrates that the best solutions are achieved by GPS/Galileo/BeiDou solutions. The accuracy in horizontal components is better than 6 mm, and in the height component better than 20 mm (one sigma). The mean convergence time for reliable ambiguity-fixing is about 1.37 min with 0.12 min standard deviation among stations without using ionosphere corrections and the third frequency measurements. The contribution of BDS is numerically highlighted.

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Comparison of Single-Site Ionospheric Delays Derived from Geometry-Free and Geometry-Based Approaches with an Analysis of Orbit and Clock Error Effects

Liu

Zhao

Chen

et al. 2021

Atmosphere

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The reparameterization of the geometry-free and geometry-based approaches to derive single-site ionospheric delays using Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) measurements is described. Kalman filtering is used to compute the geometry-free and geometry-based ionospheric delays in a forward computation procedure, aiming for a real-time application case. The numerical similarity and differences between the geometry-free and geometry-based ionospheric delays are assessed in terms of both formal and experimental errors (precision). The differences between geometry-free and geometry-based ionospheric delays are derived using two types of precise orbit and clock products. The effects of the precise orbit and clock residual errors are analyzed. The correlation coefficients between the L1 and L2 wide-lane ambiguities with the ionospheric delay are derived and analyzed. It is discovered that the geometry-based ionospheric delay is negatively correlated with geometry-based wide-lane ambiguities, while the geometry-free ionospheric delay and wide-lane ambiguities are much less correlated. A simulation analysis indicates that the impacts on geometry-based ionospheric delay estimates are partly coincided with the actual time-variant errors of the used orbit and clock in the line-of-sight direction.

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Analysis of Wide-Lane Ambiguities Derived from Geometry-Free and Geometry-Based Precise Point Positioning Models and Their Implication for Orbit and Clock Quality

Cited by 3 publications

References 18 publications

Assessment of BeiDou-2 Orbit and Clock Quality Based on Analysis of Wide-Lane Ambiguities Derived from PPP Models

Assessment of BeiDou-2 Orbit and Clock Quality Based on Analysis of Wide-Lane Ambiguities Derived from PPP Models

A variant of raw observation approach for BDS/GNSS precise point positioning with fast integer ambiguity resolution

Comparison of Single-Site Ionospheric Delays Derived from Geometry-Free and Geometry-Based Approaches with an Analysis of Orbit and Clock Error Effects

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