Distributed Orbit Determination for Global Navigation Satellite System with Inter-Satellite Link

Abstract

To keep the global navigation satellite system functional during extreme conditions, it is a trend to employ autonomous navigation technology with inter-satellite link. As in the newly built BeiDou system (BDS-3) equipped with Ka-band inter-satellite links, every individual satellite has the ability of communicating and measuring distances among each other. The system also has less dependence on the ground stations and improved navigation performance. Because of the huge amount of measurement data, centralized data processing algorithm for orbit determination is suggested to be replaced by a distributed one in which each satellite in the constellation is required to finish a partial computation task. In current paper, the balanced extended Kalman filter algorithm for distributed orbit determination is proposed and compared with whole-constellation centralized extended Kalman filter, iterative cascade extended Kalman filter, and increasing measurement covariance extended Kalman filter. The proposed method demands a lower computation power however yields results with a relatively good accuracy.

Inter-Satellite Link Enhanced Orbit Determination for BeiDou-3

“…Further study found that UHF-band ISL has a poor anti-interference capability and large measurement noise, and the observations were seriously affected by multipath effects (Rajan et al, 2003a;2003b), hence GPS III satellites are equipped with upgraded antennae, and each satellite in the constellation will have the ability to make ISL measurements and communicate with other satellites. (Maine et al, 2003;Luba et al, 2005;Wen et al, 2019). Given the successful experience of GPS, Globalnaya Navigazionnaya Sputnikovaya Sistema (GLONASS) and Galileo have also proposed their own ISL development plans (Revnivych, 2012;Kulik, 2001;Fernández 2011).…”