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Principles, methods and applications of cycle slip detection and repair under complex observation conditions

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Abstract

With the popularity of global navigation satellite system (GNSS) applications, how to tackle the cycle slips under complex observation conditions is inevitable. Here, the complex observation condition means that one may face the challenges of harsh environment, single-frequency low-cost receiver, or real-time kinematic situation, etc. However, most currently existing cycle slip detection and repair methods are designed for specific scenarios, and little attention has been paid to the unified method, which limits the availability, precision and reliability of cycle slip processing, especially under complex observation conditions. This paper is the first to systematically and comprehensively study the principles, methods and applications of cycle slip detection and repair under complex observation conditions. Firstly, one unified method of cycle slip processing is proposed, which mainly has three aspects. Specifically, the geometry-free (GF), geometry-based (GB), and geometry-fixed (GFix) models are designed for the geometric term; the ionosphere-free, ionosphere-unbiased, and ionosphere-biased models are designed for the ionospheric delay; the observation-domain (OD)-, state-domain (SD)-, and coordinate-domain (CD)-aided approaches are used to assist the cycle slip processing. Secondly, three practical cycle slip processing methods are also proposed based on the above unified method, focusing on three typical complex observation conditions. They are the SD-aided GFix method, OD- and CD-aided GB method, and GF combined GB method. Three experiments were conducted and analyzed in detail to validate the effectiveness of these proposed methods. The results show that the unified method is feasible and superior, and the three new specific methods can detect and repair the small, multiple, and insensitive cycle slips better than the traditional methods under complex observation conditions. Typically, when applying the proposed methods, the success rate of ambiguity resolution can be improved by approximately 39%, and centimeter-level and millimeter-level positioning accuracy can be obtained in RTK and PPP.

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Data availability

The experimental data of this study are available from the corresponding author for academic purposes on reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (42004014), the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province (BK20200530).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Earth Sciences and Engineering, Hohai University, Nanjing, 211100, China

    Zhetao Zhang, Jinwen Zeng & Xiufeng He

  2. College of Surveying and GeoInformatics, Tongji University, Shanghai, 200092, China

    Bofeng Li

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  1. Zhetao Zhang
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  2. Jinwen Zeng
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  3. Bofeng Li
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  4. Xiufeng He
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Contributions

ZZ proposed the methods, derived the formulae, designed the experiments, and wrote and revised the paper. JZ worked out the technical details, and revised the paper. BL supervised the study, and modified the original manuscript. XH contributed to the final version of the manuscript. All authors approved of the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Zhetao Zhang.

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Zhang, Z., Zeng, J., Li, B. et al. Principles, methods and applications of cycle slip detection and repair under complex observation conditions. J Geod 97, 50 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00190-023-01743-z

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