Carrier Phase-Based Ionospheric Gradient Monitor Under the Mixed Gaussian Distribution

Abstract

Anomalous ionospheric gradient is a critical risk to be monitored by ground-based augmentation systems (GBASs) utilized for safety-of-life navigation applications. A dual-frequency carrier phase-based ionospheric gradient monitoring method is proposed under the mixed Gaussian distribution. The minimum detection error of the proposed method can be greatly reduced by allowing acceptable ambiguity resolution failure modes, given the required averaging length. The real BeiDou navigation satellite system data were utilized to test the proposed method. The experimental results showed that the minimum detection error (MDE) of the proposed dual-frequency ionospheric gradient monitoring method can be reduced by at least 30% in comparison with the maximum acceptable anomalous ionospheric gradient of category III GBAS. This study demonstrated that the proposed method can be used to protect against the ionospheric gradient for a ground-based augmentation system.