Multi-GNSS products and services at iGMAS Wuhan Innovation Application Center: strategy and evaluation

Abstract

Over the past years the International Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) Monitoring and Assessment System (iGMAS) Wuhan Innovation Application Center (IAC) dedicated to exploring the potential of multi-GNSS signals and providing a set of products and services. This contribution summarizes the strategies, achievements, and innovations of multi-GNSS orbit/clock/bias determination in iGMAS Wuhan IAC. Both the precise products and Real-Time Services (RTS) are evaluated and discussed. The precise orbit and clock products have comparable accuracy with the precise products of the International GNSS Service (IGS) and iGMAS. The multi-frequency code and phase bias products for Global Positioning System (GPS), BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS), Galileo navigation satellite system (Galileo), and GLObal NAvigation Satellite System (GLONASS) are provided to support multi-GNSS and multi-frequency Precise Point Positioning (PPP) Ambiguity Resolution (AR). Compared with dual-frequency PPP AR, the time to first fix of triple-frequency solution is improved by 30%. For RTS, the proposed orbit prediction strategy improves the three dimensional accuracy of predicted orbit by 1 cm. The multi-thread strategy and high-performance matrix library are employed to accelerate the real-time orbit and clock determination. The results with respect to the IGS precise products show the high accuracy of RTS orbits and clocks, 4–9 cm and 0.1–0.2 ns, respectively. Using real-time satellite corrections, real-time PPP solutions achieve satisfactory performance with horizontal and vertical positioning errors within 2 and 4 cm, respectively, and convergence time of 16.97 min.