Ionosphere-weighted undifferenced and uncombined PPP-RTK: theoretical models and experimental results

Abstract

AbstractPrecise ionospheric information, as like precise satellite orbits, clocks, and code/phase biases, is a critical factor for achieving fast integer ambiguity resolution in precise point positioning (PPP-AR). This study develops an ionosphere-weighted (IW) undifferenced and uncombined PPP real-time kinematic (PPP-RTK) network model using code and phase observations. We introduce between-station single-differenced ionospheric delay pseudo-observations to take advantage of the similar characteristics of ionospheric delays between two receivers tracking the same satellite. The estimable ionospheric parameters are commonly affected by the differential code bias referring to a particular receiver assigned as pivot, which facilitates the ionospheric interpolation at the user side. Then, the kinematic positioning performance of the IW PPP-RTK user model is analyzed and compared with those of PPP-AR without ionospheric corrections, RTK, and IW-RTK models during low and high solar activity days. The results show that for the PPP-RTK model, the positioning errors converge to thresholds of 2 cm for the horizontal components and 5 cm for the vertical component within 20 epochs, and the positioning errors become stable after an initialization of 20 epochs with root-mean-squared (RMS) values of approximately 0.47, 0.58 and 1.66 cm for the east, north and up components, respectively, which are superior to those of the other three models. Owing to the high ionospheric disturbance influence, the RMS values of the east and up components increase by approximately double and the mean time-to-first-fix increases by 61.5% for the PPP-RTK case.