Incorporation of the GPS satellite ephemeris covariance matrix into the precise point positioning

Abstract

In GPS positioning, usually the satellite ephemeris are fixed in the observation equations using broadcast or published values. Therefore, to have a realistic covariance matrix for the observations one must incorporate a well-defined covariance matrix of the satellite ephemeris into the observations covariance matrix. Contributions so far have discussed only the variance and covariance of the observations. Precise Point Positioning (PPP) is a technique aimed at processing of measurements from a single (stand-alone) GPS receiver to compute high-accurate position. In this paper, the covariance matrix of the satellite ephemeris and its impact on the position estimates through the PPP are discussed.