A Method for Autonomous Generation of High-Precision Time Scales for Navigation Constellations

Abstract

The time maintenance accuracy of the navigation constellation determines the user positioning and timing performance. Especially in autonomous operation scenarios, the performance of navigation constellation maintenance time directly affects the duration of constellation autonomous navigation. Among them, the frequency stability of the atomic clock onboard the navigation satellite is a key factor. In order to further improve the stability of the navigation constellation time-frequency system, combined with the development of high-precision inter-satellite link measurement technology, the idea of constructing constellation-level synthetic atomic time has gradually become the development trend of major GNSS systems. This paper gives a navigation constellation time scale generation framework, and designs an improved Kalman plus weights (KPW) time scale algorithm and time-frequency steer algorithm that integrates genetic algorithms. Finally, a 30-day autonomous timekeeping simulation was carried out using the GPS precision clock data provided by CODE, when the sampling interval is 300 s, the Allan deviation of the output time scale is 5.73 × 10−14, a 71% improvement compared with the traditional KPW time scale algorithm; when the sampling interval is 1 day, the Allan deviation is 9.17 × 10−15; when the sampling interval is 1 × 106 s, the Allan deviation is 8.87 × 10−16, a 94% improvement compared with the traditional KPW time scale algorithm. The constellation-level high-precision time scale generation technology proposed in this paper can significantly improve the stability performance of navigation constellation autonomous timekeeping.