Comparison of MEO, LEO, and Terrestrial IoT Configurations in Terms of GDOP and Achievable Positioning Accuracies

Abstract

Complementary solutions to the Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) are more and more in demand to be able to achieve seamless positioning worldwide, in outdoor as well as in indoor scenarios, and to cope with increased interference threats in GNSS bands. Two of such complementary systems can rely on the emerging Low Earth Orbit (LEO) constellations and on the terrestrial long-range Internet of Things (IoT) systems, both under rapid developments nowadays. Standalone positioning solutions based on such systems complementary to GNSS can be beneficial in situations where GNSS signal is highly affected by interferences, such as jammers and spoofers, while hybrid GNSS and non-GNSS solutions making use of LEO and terrestrial IoT signals as signals of opportunity can improve the achievable positioning accuracy in a wide variety of scenarios. Comparative research of performance bounds achievable through MEO, LEO, and terrestrial IoT signals are still hard to find in the current literature. It is the goal of this paper to introduce a unified framework to compare these three system types, based on geometry matrices and error modeling, and to present a performance analysis in terms of Geometric Dilution of Precision (GDOP) and positioning accuracy bounds.