Investigating the historical development of accuracy and precision of Galileo by means of relative GNSS analysis technique

Galileo navigation system has significantly expanded satellite constellation over the last few years and now serves with 22 satellites in three orbital planes. The development of the Galileo is not only limited to the number of satellites in the space segment, but also the quality of the IGS MGEX products produced by different Analysis Centers has increased gradually and brought up the topic of investigation of the accuracy and precision of the Galileo-only positioning. However, almost all of the studies on Galileo-only positioning in the literature have been performed with Precise Point Positioning method and comprehensive studies with the relative positioning technique are quite a few. In this study, the development of the accuracy and precision of the Galileo from 2016 to the end of 2019 (4 years) has been investigated for the first time by means of relative positioning technique. For this purpose, data of eight GNSS stations selected from the IGS MGEX network were obtained and analyzed with GAMIT/GLOBK software as GPS-only and Galileo-only, separately. Using the daily solutions obtained from both navigation systems, time series were produced and the differences between them were compared in order to reveal the Galileo accuracy. According to the results, the accuracy of the Galileo was variable during the experiment and it could be examined in three periods. The averages of 3D positioning error in the first period (2016-2017) is 14.92 mm and improved by 56%, and decreased to 6.55 mm in the second period (2017-2018), and then improvement at 23% in the third period (2018 to the end of 2019) and decrescent to level of 5.13 mm on average for all stations. Similarly, standard deviations obtained from Galileo increased during the experiment and during the 3rd period it was closed to a few mm with GPS. It was concluded that the accuracy and precision of the Galileo showed parallel development and the development was directly related to the number of satellites in the Galileo constellation, and as a result, nowadays, Galileo-derived coordinates are close to the coordinates obtained from the GPS by a few mm.