Single Point Positioning Using GPS, GLONASS and BeiDou Satellites

Rock Santerre¹, Lin Pan², Changsheng Cai², Jianjun Zhu²

¹Department of Geomatic Sciences, Laval University, Quebec City, Canada.
²School of Geosciences and Info-Physics, Central South University, Changsha, China.

DOI: 10.4236/pos.2014.54013                

Abstract

This paper introduces the Chinese BeiDou satellite system and its comparison with the actual completed American GPS and the Russian GLONASS systems. The actual BeiDou system consists of 14 satellites covering totally the Asia-Pacific area. A Single Point Positioning (SPP) test has been realised in Changsha, Hunan province, China, to show the advantage of using combined pseudorange solutions from these 3 satellite navigation systems especially in obstructed sites. The test shows that, with an elevation mask angle of 10°, the accuracy is improved by about 20% in horizontal coordinates and nearly 50% in the vertical component using the simultaneous observations of the 3 systems compared to the GPS/GLONASS solution. For the processing with an elevation mask angle of 30°, most of the time less than 4 GPS satellites were available for the GPS-only case and no solution was possible. However, in this difficult situation, the combined GPS/GLONASS/ BeiDou solutions provided an accuracy (rms values) of about 5 m.

Keywords

BeiDou, GPS, GLONASS, Single Point Positioning

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

References

[1]	Gao, Z., Zhang, H., Zhao, Q., Hu, Z. and Shen, W. (2014) Analyzing the Impact of Satellite Clock-TGD Coupled Error on BDS Positioning Accuracy. In: Sun, J., et al., Eds., China Satellite Navigation Conference (CSNC) 2014 Proceedings: Volume I, Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering Volume 303, 267-278. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-54737-9_24
[2]	Bhatta, B. (2011) Global Navigation Satellite Systems. CRC Press, Boca Raton.
[3]	Jing, Y., Zeng, A. and Xu, T. (2014) Fusion Positioning of BDS/GPS Based on Variance Component Estimation and Its Application for Geodetic Control Network. In: Sun, J., et al., Eds., China Satellite Navigation Conference (CSNC) 2014 Proceedings: Volume I, Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering Volume 303, 115-123. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-54737-9_12
[4]	Navipedia-ESA (2014). http://www.navipedia.net/index.php/Main_Page
[5]	IGS-International GNSS Service (2014). http://igscb.jpl.nasa.gov/
[6]	Heng, L., Gao, G.X., Walter, T. and Enge, P. (2011) Statistical Characterization of GLONASS Broadcast Ephemeris Errors. Proceedings of the 24th International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of the Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS 2011), Portland, September 2011, 3109-3117.
[7]	Chen, L., Jiao, W., Huang, X., Geng, C., Ai, L., Lu, L. and Hu, Z. (2013) Study on Signal-In-Space Errors Calculation Method and Statistical Characterization of BeiDou Navigation Satellite System. China Satellite Navigation Conference (CSNC) 2013 Proceedings, Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering, 243, 423-434. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-37398-5_39
[8]	Klobuchar, J. (1987) Ionospheric Time-Delay Algorithms for Single-Frequency GPS Users. IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems, AES-23, 325-331. http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TAES.1987.310829
[9]	Saastamoinen, J. (1973) Contribution to the Theory of Atmospheric Refraction. Bulletin Géodésique, 107, 13-34. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/BF02522083
[10]	Gerdan, G.P. (1995) A Comparison of Four Methods of Weighting Double Difference Pseudorange Measurements. The Australian Surveyor, 40, 60-66. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00050334.1995.10558564
[11]	Cai, C., Pan, L. and Gao, Y. (2014) A Precise Weighting Approach with Application to Combined L1/B1 GPS/Bei-Dou Positioning. Journal of Navigation, 67, 911-925. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0373463314000320
[12]	Cai, C., Gao, Y., Pan, L. and Dai, W. (2014) An Analysis on Combined GPS/COMPASS Data Quality and Its Effect on Single Point Positioning Accuracy under Different Observing Conditions. Advances in Space Research, 54, 818-829. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.asr.2013.02.019