Elsevier

Advances in Space Research

Volume 63, Issue 7, 1 April 2019, Pages 2189-2211
Advances in Space Research

Evaluation and analysis on positioning performance of BDS/QZSS satellite navigation systems in Asian-Pacific region

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.asr.2018.12.026Get rights and content

Abstract

By using the observation data and products of precise obit and clock offset from Multi-GNSS Experiment (MGEX) of the International GNSS Service (IGS) and GNSS Research Centre, Curtin University in this paper, the positioning performance of BDS/QZSS satellite navigation system has been analyzed and evaluated in aspects of the quantity of visible satellites, DOP value, multipath effect, signal-to-noise ratio, static PPP and kinematic PPP. The analysis results show that compared to BDS single system when the cutoff angle are 30°and 40°, the DOP value of BDS/QZSS combined system has decreased above 20%, and the quantity of visible satellites increased about 16–30% respectively, because of the improved spatial geometric configuration. The magnitude of satellite multipath effect of BDS system shows the trend of MEO > IGSO > GEO, which is consistent with that of QZSS satellite system, as the constellation structure of the two systems is similar. The variation tendencies of signal-to-noise ratio with respect to elevation angle of the two systems are almost the same at all frequencies, showing that at the same elevation angle the signal-to-noise ratio of MEO satellites is higher than that of IGSO satellites, as the higher obit is the lower transmitting power is obtained. For having a specially designed obit, the variation of signal-to-noise ratio of BDS system is more stable. However, the magnitude of signal-to-noise ratio of QZSS system appears the trend of frequency 3 > frequency 2 > frequency 1. The static PPP performance of the BDS/QZSS combination system has been improved more significantly than the BDS single system in E, N and U directions. When the cutoff angle are at 7°, 15° and 30°, the PPP accuracy is increased about 25–34% in U direction, 10–13% and 23–34% in E and N directions respectively. When the elevation angle is large (40°), compared to BDS single system at lower elevation angles (7° and 15°) the PPP accuracy of the BDS/QZSS combination system is improved above 30% in U direction. In kinematic PPP performance, compared to BDS single system, the accuracy, availability and reliability of the BDS/QZSS combination system has been improved too, especially at large elevation angles (30° and 40°), the kinematic PPP accuracy in E and U directions has been improved about 10–50%, and above 50% in U direction. It can be concluded that the combination with QZSS system can improve the positioning accuracy, reliability and stability of BDS system. In the future, with the improvement of the satellite construction of Japan’s QZSS system and the global networking of China’s BDS satellites, the QZSS satellites will contribute greatly to improve the positioning accuracy, reliability, availability and stability of GNSS systems in areas such as cities, mountains, densely-packed buildings and severely covered areas in Asian-Pacific region.

Introduction

In large cutoff angle conditions and in areas such as densely-built urban, mountainous and forest regions, positioning by a single system alone is often difficult to meet the requirements of precise navigation and positioning. Because in these circumstances, the less number of visible satellites of a single system will result in poor positioning accuracy and positioning performance. In order to overcome such problems, Japan has invested in the construction of QZSS satellite system to enhance the positioning serviceability with other system satellites. In recent years, many researchers have done a lot of studies on QZSS and other satellite systems.

Odolinksi et al. (2016) studied and analyzed the RTK positioning performance of GPS and BDS combined system, and concluded that with the SF-DS higher elevation cut off angles than the conventional 10◦ or 15◦ can be used. The experiment with low-cost receivers for the SF-DS reveals (for the first time) that it has the potential to achieve comparable ambiguity resolution performance to that of a DF-SS (L1, L2 GPS), based on the survey-grade receivers.

Zaminpardaz et al. (2018) studied the positioning results of the new generation regional satellite system QZSS in Australia, in which the RTK positioning performance of the single system QZSS through three frequencies (L1 + L2 + L5). The results shown that despite the relatively poor 4-satellite receiver-to-satellite positioning geometry over Australia, thus showing that already now centimeter-level stand-alone QZSS positioning is possible with the current 4-satellite constellation (February–March 2018).

Odolinski et al. (2015) also studied the RTK positioning performance of single frequency four-system of BDS + Galileo + QZSS + GPS. It is concluded that the four-system RTK model allows for improved integer ambiguity resolution and positioning performance over the single-, dual- or triple-systems, particularly for higher cutoff angle.

Li et al.(2017) studied the L5/E5a SS-RTK positioning performance of single frequency GPS + Galileo + IRNSS + QZSS system. They concluded that the convergence time of the float solutions, reaching a subdecimeter precision level, reduces from 30 to 40 min (single-antenna array) to about 20 min (four-antenna array).

Nadarajah and Teunissen (2014) studied the key algorithm for solving ambiguity of carrier phase of single frequency GPS/Galileo/QZSS/SBAS system under bad environment. The results demonstrate the enhanced robustness 20 that four systems bring to single-epoch single-frequency attitude determination.

It can be concluded from the studies mentioned above that many useful results on the combination of QZSS with other satellite system have been obtained. However, most of the studies were focused on single frequency RTK positioning performance and the enhancement of GPS and Galileo satellite systems with QZSS system, in which there were seldom studies on BDS system enhanced with QZSS system.

In fact precise point positioning technology, PPP (Zumberge et al.,1997) is useful in many fields such as mobile surveying in a large area, large network fast calculating, precise timing, atmospheric sciences and geodynamics.

In view of this, in this paper, by using the observation data and products of precise obit and clock offset from Multi-GNSS Experiment (MGEX) of the International GNSS Service (IGS) and GNSS Research Centre, Curtin University, the positioning performance of BDS/QZSS satellite navigation system has been analyzed and evaluated in aspects of the quantity of visible satellites, DOP value, multipath effect, signal-to-noise ratio, static PPP and kinematic PPP.

Section snippets

Constellation structure of BDS/QZSS satellite navigation systems

The Beidou Satellite Navigation System (BDS) constellation is now made up of 35 satellites. By the end 2012, 16 satellites had been launched, among them 14 satellites had constituted network to formally started regional navigation services, including 5 GEO (Geosynchronous Earth Orbit) satellites, 5 IGSO (Inclined Synchronous Orbit) satellites and 4 MEO (Medium Earth Orbit) satellites, it is the first third-orbit hybrid navigation constellation (Guo et al., 2017a). It is expected that it will

Test data sources

The test data used in this paper is from the Multi-GNSS Experiment (MGEX) of the International GNSS Service (IGS) and GNSS Research Centre, Curtin University (http://saegnss2.curtin.edu/ldc/). The basic information of 13 observation stations as test data sources in this paper is listed in Table 2, in which there is only one station in China, the others are in Asian and Pacific regions outside China, and the observation date was during August 8, 2018 for evaluation and analysis of BDS/QZSS

Visibility and DOP analysis of BDS/QZSS satellite

In GNSS measurements, navigation positioning services cannot be provided if the number of visible satellites is less than four. The position error of GNSS satellite navigation and positioning system is mainly related to user equivalent range error (UERE) and Dilution Of Precision (DOP). The DOP includes Geometric Dilution of Precision (GDOP), Position Dilution Of Precision (PDOP), Horizontal Dilution Of Precision (HDOP), and Vertical Accuracy Decay Factor. (Vertical Dilution of Precision,

Conclusions

By using the observation data and products of precise obit and clock offset from Multi-GNSS Experiment (MGEX) of the International GNSS Service (IGS) and GNSS Research Centre, Curtin University in this paper, the positioning performance of BDS/QZSS satellite navigation system in Asian-Pacific region has been analyzed and evaluated in aspects of the quantity of visible satellites, DOP value, multipath effect, signal-to-noise ratio, static PPP and kinematic PPP. Some conclusions can be made as

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the anonymous reviewers and editors for their helpful constructive suggestions and comments, which has significantly improved the quality of this paper. The authors gratefully acknowledge IGS Multi-GNSS Experiment (MGEX) for providing GNSS data and products (http://mgex.igs.org/). Many thanks go to the GNSS Research Centre, Curtin University for providing multi-GNSS data (http://saegnss2.curtin.edu./ldc/). The PPP experiments are conducted based on the open-source software

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