Precise point positioning using the regional beidou navigation satellite constellation

Abstract

On 27 December 2012 it was announced officially that the Chinese Navigation Satellite System BeiDou (BDS) was able to provide operational services over the Asia-Pacific region. The quality of BDS observations was confirmed as comparable with those of GPS, and relative positioning in static and kinematic modes were also demonstrated to be very promising. As Precise Point Positioning (PPP) technology is widely recognized as a method of precise positioning service, especially in real-time, in this contribution we concentrate on the PPP performance using BDS data only. BDS PPP in static, kinematic and simulated real-time kinematic mode is carried out for a regional network with six stations equipped with GPS- and BDS-capable receivers, using precise satellite orbits and clocks estimated from a global BDS tracking network. To validate the derived positions and trajectories, they are compared to the daily PPP solution using GPS data. The assessment confirms that the performance of BDS PPP is very comparable with GPS in terms of both convergence time and accuracy. Copyright © The Royal Institute of Navigation 2014 Â.