Performance of global positioning system precise time and frequency transfer with integer ambiguity resolution

Abstract

Abstract The Global Positioning System (GPS) carrier-phase technique is a widely used spatial tool for remote precise time and frequency transfer. However, the performance of traditional GPS time and frequency transfer has been limited because the ambiguity parameter is still the float solution. This study focuses on the performance of GPS precise time and frequency transfer with integer ambiguity resolution and discusses the corresponding mathematical model. Fractional-cycle bias (FCB) products were estimated using an ionosphere-free combination. The results show that the satellite wide-lane (WL) FCB products are stable, with a standard deviation (STD) of 0.006 cycles. The narrow-lane (NL) FCB products were estimated over 15 min with a STD of 0.020 cycles. More than 98% of the WL and NL residuals are smaller than 0.25 cycles, which helps to fix the ambiguity into integers during the time and frequency transfer. Subsequently, the performance of time transfers with integer ambiguity resolution at two time links between international laboratories was assessed in real-time and post-processing modes and compared. The results show that fixing the ambiguity into an integer in the real-time mode significantly decreases the convergence time compared with the traditional float approach. The improvement is ∼49.5%. The frequency stability of the fixed solution is notably better than that of the float solution. Improvements of 48.15% and 27.9% were determined for the IENG–USN8 and WAB2–USN8 time links, respectively.