GLONASS real-time wide-lane ambiguity resolution with an enhanced geometry-based model for medium-range baselines

Abstract

Double-difference wide-lane integer ambiguities are determined first to assist narrow-lane ambiguity resolution in real-time medium-range baseline resolution. The Hatch-Melbourne-Wübbena (HMW) is the conventional strategy for wide-lane ambiguity resolution, which works well for GPS/Galileo/BDS. However, the un-canceled inter frequency bias (IFB) on double-difference measurement causes that the HMW combination is invalid on GLONASS wide-lane ambiguity resolution. The residual IFB in double-difference measurement may be several meters, especially between inhomogeneous stations. There is no effective method to model or tabulate ranging-codes IFB. In this paper, we propose a device-independent geometry-based model to achieve GLONASS real-time wide-lane ambiguity resolution for medium-range baselines. Since zenith tropospheric delay and slant ionospheric delay of satellites are estimated as unknown parameters, we utilize atmosphere-weighted algorithm to enhance the model strength and decrease the dependence on pseudorange measurement. For medium-range baseline, GLONASS wide-lane ambiguity float solutions can converge quickly by the geometry-based model. The cumulative frequency of WL AR can exceed 99% during 10 epochs. Benefiting from rapid and reliable wide-lane ambiguity resolution, the positioning accuracy of GPS/GLONASS RTK fixed solution are greater than 3 cm in level direction and 5 cm in upward direction for 40–100 km baselines. An approximately 35% improvement rate is observed in each direction compared with that of single GPS RTK. Since less available satellites for single-GLONASS mode, the convergence of wide-lane ambiguity becomes slower. For base stations with known coordinates, the enhanced geometry-based model can be developed to the enhanced geometry-fixed model and are applied to longer baselines. Assisting with the geometry-fixed model, more than 90% of GLONASS narrow-lane ambiguities can be fixed quickly for 80–160 km baselines. It should be noted that the accuracy of external atmospheric delay is critical to the performance of the geometry-based method. Its benefit may weaken with the increasing of baseline length, when external atmospheric delays are set as 0 directly.