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A consistent and grid-based regional slant ionospheric model with an increasing number of satellite corrections for PPP-RTK

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Abstract

Ionospheric corrections are critical in fast precise point positioning real-time kinematic (PPP-RTK), in which the regional slant ionospheric model (RSIM) is commonly used. For the conventional RSIM, only common satellites tracked by the whole set of reference stations are selected in delivering the network corrections to keep the receiver-related biases consistent. This decreases the number of available satellites. Therefore, two kinds of aligned RSIMs are proposed by recovering ionospheric observables and aligning ionospheric observables with the same pivot receiver-related bias. The proposed methods derive a consistent ionospheric model with more satellites involved. Effective strategies to transfer receiver-related biases are investigated, where satellites with a high elevation and many ambiguity-fixed epochs show better performance. To validate the performance of the proposed method, both static and kinematic positioning tests are carried out. For the static test, the aligned RSIM achieved faster convergence than the conventional RSIM, and the positioning accuracy in the east, north, and vertical after the first 1 min is 0.029, 0.026, and 0.074 m, respectively. For the kinematic test, the root mean square (RMS) of positioning errors reduces from 1.00 to 0.65 m for the east, from 0.54 to 0.43 m for the north, and from 0.89 to 0.71 m for the vertical component using the aligned model. Also, two typical urban experiments were carried out, demonstrating a fast convergence within 16 s when the aligned RSIM is added.

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Data availability

Data are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Abbreviations

CAS:

Chinese academy of sciences

DCBs:

Differential code biases

GBM:

GeoBM

GIM:

Global ionospheric map

IGS:

International GNSS Service

IMU:

Inertial measurement unit

NAUG:

Number of satellites with ionospheric augmentation information

NSAT:

Number of satellites

PPP:

Precise point positioning

PPP-RTK:

Precise point positioning real-time kinematic

PPP-RTK(A):

PPP-RTK constrained with the aligned RSIM-1

PPP-RTK(C):

PPP-RTK constrained with the conventional RSIM

QZSS:

Quasi-Zenith satellite system

RSIM:

Regional slant ionospheric model

STD:

Standard deviation

STEC:

Slant total electron content

TECU:

Total electr

UPD:

Uncalibrated phase delay

VTEC:

Vertical total electron content

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Acknowledgements

We appreciate the Geespace Company collecting the static data, which made the experiment possible. Special thanks to Yang Gao and Liang Zhao for the discussion and proofreading. The computations in this paper were run on the Siyuan cluster supported by the Center for High Performance Computing at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. We also thank the support from the National Key R&D Program of China (No. 2022YFB3904402) and Shanghai Science and Technology Committee under Grant (20511103103).

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  1. Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China

    Sijie Lyu, Yan Xiang, Yi Zhang, Hongzhou Yang, Ling Pei, Wenxian Yu & Trieu-Kien Turong

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  1. Sijie Lyu
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Correspondence to Yan Xiang.

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Lyu, S., Xiang, Y., Zhang, Y. et al. A consistent and grid-based regional slant ionospheric model with an increasing number of satellite corrections for PPP-RTK. GPS Solut 27, 97 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10291-023-01439-z

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