On the temperature sensitivity of multi-GNSS intra- and inter-system biases and the impact on RTK positioning

• Published in: GPS solutions Vol. 24; no. 4
• Main Authors: Mi, Xiaolong, Zhang, Baocheng, Odolinski, Robert, Yuan, Yunbin
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Berlin/Heidelberg Springer Berlin Heidelberg 01.10.2020; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Ambient temperature; Atmospheric Sciences; Automotive Engineering; Earth and Environmental Science; Earth Sciences; Electrical Engineering; Empirical analysis; Environmental factors; Geophysics/Geodesy; Global navigation satellite system; Global positioning systems; GPS; Hardware; Mathematical analysis; Original Article; Satellite constellations; Satellite observation; Space Exploration and Astronautics; Space Sciences (including Extraterrestrial Physics; Variability; Differential phase biases (DPBs); Inter-system biases (ISBs); Real-time kinematic (RTK); BDS-3; Differential code biases (DCBs); Global navigation satellite system (GNSS)
• DOI: 10.1007/s10291-020-01027-5
• ISSN: 1080-5370

The intra-system biases, including differential code biases (DCBs) and differential phase biases (DPBs), are generally defined as the receiver-dependent hardware delays between different frequencies in a single global navigation satellite system (GNSS) constellation. Likewise, the inter-system biases (ISBs) are the differential code and phase hardware delays between different GNSSs, which are of great relevance for combined processing of multi-GNSS and multi-frequency observations. Although the two biases are usually assumed to remain unchanged for at least 1 day, they sometimes can exhibit remarkable intraday variability, likely due to environmental factors, particularly the ambient temperature. It has been proved that the possible short-term temporal variations of receiver DCBs and DPBs are directly related to ambient temperature fluctuation. We analyze whether the variability of the biases is sensitive to temperature and further identify how this affects the performance of real-time kinematic (RTK) positioning. Our numerical tests, carried out using GPS, BDS-3, Galileo and QZSS observations collected by zero and short baselines, suggest two major findings. First, we found that while ISBs associated with overlapping frequencies are fairly stable, those associated with non-overlapping frequencies can exhibit remarkable variability over a rather short period of time, driven by the changes of ambient temperature. Second, by pre-calibrating and modeling of the biases for the baselines at hand, the empirical success rates and positioning performance can be significantly improved when compared to classical and inter-system differencing, with both models assuming time-invariant receiver DCBs, DPBs and ISBs.