Feasibility analysis of high-precision deformation monitoring using BeiDou navigation satellite system

Abstract

Since the launch of the last GEO satellite on December 27, 2012, BeiDou regional navigation satellite system (BDS) has been announced to provide positioning, navigation, timing (PNT) and short message communication services in the whole Asia-Pacific region, which suggests a new GNSS system could be applied for deformation monitoring in the future. In order to investigate the performance of BDS in high-precision deformation monitoring, an experiment platform was designed where the actual displacements could be defined accurately as the reference and a corresponding BDS data processing software was developed. With the platform, data over 15 days were obtained and were processed every 4 h for evaluating the precision and reliability of deformation monitoring using BDS only. The results show that, for short baselines the repeatability of the horizontal and vertical directions are better than 1 and 2 mm, respectively. In addition, the comparison of deformations calculated from the BDS data and the reference displacements derived by the experiment platform confirms a good agreement, which indicates the potential of BDS for deformation monitoring applications.