scholarly journals Refining GPS/GLONASS Satellite Clock Offset Estimation in the Presence of Pseudo-Range Inter-Channel Biases

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (11) ◽  
pp. 1821
Author(s):  
Qingsong Ai ◽  
Yunbin Yuan ◽  
Baocheng Zhang ◽  
Tianhe Xu ◽  
Yongchang Chen

Because of the frequency division multiple access (FDMA) technique, Russian global navigation satellite system (GLONASS) observations suffer from pseudo-range inter-channel biases (ICBs), which adversely affect satellite clock offset estimation. In this study, the GLONASS pseudo-range ICB is treated in four different ways: as ignorable parameters (ICB-NONE), polynomial functions of frequency (ICB-FPOL), frequency-specific parameters (ICB-RF), and satellite-specific parameters (ICB-RS). Data from 110 international global navigation satellite system (GNSS) service stations were chosen to obtain the ICBs and were used for satellite clock offset estimation. The ICBs from the different schemes varied from −20 ns to 80 ns. The ICB-RS model yielded the best results, improving the clock offset accuracy from 300 ps to about 100 ps; it could improve the GLONASS precise point positioning (PPP) accuracy and the converging time by approximately 50% and 30%, respectively. Along similar lines, we introduced the GPS-ICB parameters in the process of GPS satellite clock estimation and GPS/GLONASS PPP, as ICBs may exist for GPS because of different chip shape distortions among GPS satellites. This possibility was found to be the case. Further, the GPS-ICB magnitude ranged from −2 ns to 2 ns, and the estimated satellite clock offsets could improve the accuracy of the GPS and combined GPS/GLONASS PPP by 10%; it also accelerated the converging time by more than 15% thanks to the GPS-ICB calibration.

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (8) ◽  
pp. 992
Author(s):  
Li ◽  
Xu ◽  
Flechtner ◽  
Förste ◽  
Lu ◽  
...  

Conventional relative kinematic positioning is difficult to be applied in the polar region of Earth since there is a very sparse distribution of reference stations, while precise point positioning (PPP), using data of a stand-alone receiver, is recognized as a promising tool for obtaining reliable and accurate trajectories of moving platforms. However, PPP and its integer ambiguity fixing performance could be much degraded by satellite orbits and clocks of poor quality, such as those of the geostationary Earth orbit (GEO) satellites of the BeiDou navigation satellite system (BDS), because temporal variation of orbit errors cannot be fully absorbed by ambiguities. To overcome such problems, a network-based processing, referred to as precise orbit positioning (POP), in which the satellite clock offsets are estimated with fixed precise orbits, is implemented in this study. The POP approach is validated in comparison with PPP in terms of integer ambiguity fixing and trajectory accuracy. In a simulation test, multi-GNSS (global navigation satellite system) observations over 14 days from 136 globally distributed MGEX (the multi-GNSS Experiment) receivers are used and four of them on the coast of Antarctica are processed in kinematic mode as moving stations. The results show that POP can improve the ambiguity fixing of all system combinations and significant improvement is found in the solution with BDS, since its large orbit errors are reduced in an integrated adjustment with satellite clock offsets. The four-system GPS+GLONASS+Galileo+BDS (GREC) fixed solution enables the highest 3D position accuracy of about 3.0 cm compared to 4.3 cm of the GPS-only solution. Through a real flight experiment over Antarctica, it is also confirmed that POP ambiguity fixing performs better and thus can considerably speed up (re-)convergence and reduce most of the fluctuations in PPP solutions, since the continuous tracking time is short compared to that in other regions.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohammad Al-Khaldi ◽  
Joel Johnson ◽  
Scott Gleason

<p>NASA's Cyclone Global Navigation Satellite System (CYGNSS) mission has continued to provide measurements of land surface specular scattering since its launch in December 2016. CYGNSS’s operates in a GNSS-R configuration in which  CYGNSS satellites together with GPS satellites form a bistatic radar geometry with GPS satellites acting as transmitters and CYGNSS satellites acting as receivers. The fundamental GNSS-R measurement obtained using the CYGNSS observatories is the delay-Doppler map (DDM), from which normalized radar cross section (NRCS) estimates are derived. The sensitivity of CYGNSS measurements to a wide range of surface properties has motivated their use for soil moisture retrievals.</p><p>This presentation reports an updated analysis of soil moisture retrieval errors using a previously reported time series soil moisture retrieval algorithm that considers a  multi-year CYGNSS dataset. The presentation also reports recent progress in which further simplifications to the proposed algorithm are introduced that limit its need for ancillary soil moisture data and promote use in an operational capacity. This is accomplished, in part, through the incorporation of a recently developed global Level-1 coherence detection methodology and the use of a soil moisture climatology.</p><p>Soil moisture is sensed using a time-series retrieval in which NRCS ratios derived from CYGNSS measurements are used to form a system of equations that can be solved for a times series of surface reflectivities. While the NRCS exhibits a dependence on a wide range of properties such as soil moisture, soil composition, vegetation cover, and surface roughness, NRCS ratios in consecutive acquisitions, at sufficiently low latency, exhibit a direct proportionality to reflectivity ratios that are a function of soil permittivity and therefore soil moisture. The dependence of NRCS ratios on reflectivity facilitates a location dependent inversion of reflectivity to soil moisture through a dielectric mixing model. The use of NRCS ratios however results in N-1 equations for the N soil moistures in the time series, thereby necessitating the incorporation of additional information typically expressed in terms of maximum and/or minimum soil moisture (or reflectivity) values over the time series when solving the system. These values can be obtained either from ancillary data from other systems or from a soil moisture climatology as incorporated in this presentation.</p><p>Retrieved moisture values from the updated algorithm are compared against observed values reported by the Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) mission. The findings suggest that there exists potential for using GNSS-R systems for global soil moisture retrievals with an RMS error on the order of 0.06 cm<sup>3</sup>/cm<sup>3</sup> over varied terrain. The dependence of the algorithm’s retrieval error on land cover class, soil texture, and moisture variability trends will be reported in detail in this presentation.</p>


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 373 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lewen Zhao ◽  
Pavel Václavovic ◽  
Jan Douša

The tropospheric delays estimated from the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) have been proven to be an efficient product for monitoring variations of water vapor, which plays an important role in meteorology applications. The operational GNSS water vapor monitoring system is currently based on the Global Positioning System (GPS) and GLObal NAvigation Satellite System(GLONASS) dual-frequency observations. The Galileo satellite navigation system has been evolving continuously, and on 11 February 2019, the constellation reached 22 active satellites, achieving a capability of standalone Precise Point Positioning (PPP) and tropospheric estimation that is global in scope. This enhancement shows a 37% improvement if the precision of the Galileo-only zenith tropospheric delay, while we may anticipate further benefits in terms of tropospheric gradients and slant delays in the future if an optimal multi-constellation and multi-frequency processing strategy is used. First, we analyze the performance of the multi-frequency troposphere estimates based on the PPP raw observation model by comparing it with the standard ionosphere-free model. The performance of the Galileo-only tropospheric solution is then validated with respect to GPS-only solution using 48 globally distributed Multi-GNSS Experiment (MGEX) stations. The averaged bias and standard deviations are −0.3 and 5.8 mm when only using GPS satellites, respectively, and 0.0 and 6.2 mm for Galileo, respectively, when compared to the International GNSS Service (IGS) final Zenith Troposphere Delay(ZTD) products. Using receiver antenna phase center corrections from the corresponding GPS dual-frequency observations does not affect the Galileo PPP ambiguity float troposphere solutions. These results demonstrate a comparable precision achieved for both Galileo-only and GPS-only ZTD solutions, however, horizontal tropospheric gradients, estimated from standalone GPS and Galileo solutions, still show larger discrepancies, mainly due to their being less Galileo satellites than GPS satellites. Including Galileo E1, E5a, E5b, and E5 signals, along with their proper observation weighting, show the benefit of multi-frequency observations, further improving the ZTD precision by 4% when compared to the dual-frequency raw observation model. Overall, the presented results demonstrate good prospects for the application of multi-frequency Galileo observations for the tropospheric parameter estimates.


2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Fahad Alhomayani ◽  
Mohammad H. Mahoor

AbstractIn recent years, fingerprint-based positioning has gained researchers’ attention since it is a promising alternative to the Global Navigation Satellite System and cellular network-based localization in urban areas. Despite this, the lack of publicly available datasets that researchers can use to develop, evaluate, and compare fingerprint-based positioning solutions constitutes a high entry barrier for studies. As an effort to overcome this barrier and foster new research efforts, this paper presents OutFin, a novel dataset of outdoor location fingerprints that were collected using two different smartphones. OutFin is comprised of diverse data types such as WiFi, Bluetooth, and cellular signal strengths, in addition to measurements from various sensors including the magnetometer, accelerometer, gyroscope, barometer, and ambient light sensor. The collection area spanned four dispersed sites with a total of 122 reference points. Each site is different in terms of its visibility to the Global Navigation Satellite System and reference points’ number, arrangement, and spacing. Before OutFin was made available to the public, several experiments were conducted to validate its technical quality.


2010 ◽  
Vol 63 (2) ◽  
pp. 269-287 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. Abbasian Nik ◽  
M. G. Petovello

These days, Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) technology plays a critical role in positioning and navigation applications. Use of GNSS is becoming more of a need to the public. Therefore, much effort is needed to make the civilian part of the system more accurate, reliable and available, especially for the safety-of-life purposes. With the recent revitalization of Russian Global Navigation Satellite System (GLONASS), with a constellation of 20 satellites in August 2009 and the promise of 24 satellites by 2010, it is worthwhile concentrating on the GLONASS system as a method of GPS augmentation to achieve more reliable and accurate navigation solutions.


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