Research on Accelerating Single-Frequency Precise Point Positioning Convergence with Atmospheric Constraint

Abstract

An increasing number of researchers have conducted in-depth research on the advantages of low-cost single-frequency (SF) receivers, which can effectively use ionospheric information when compared to dual-frequency ionospheric-free combination. However, SF observations are bound to increase the unknown parameters and prolong the convergence time. It is desirable if the convergence time can be reduced by external information constraints, for example atmospheric constraints, which include ionosphere- or troposphere constraints. In this study, ionospheric delay constraints, tropospheric delay constraints, and their dual constraints were considered. Additionally, a total of 18,720 test experiments were performed. First, the nearest-neighbor extrapolation (NENE), bilinear- (BILI), bicubic- (BICU), and Junkins weighted-interpolation (JUNK) method of Global Ionospheric Map (GIM) grid products were analyzed. The statistically verified BILI in the percentage of convergence time, average convergence time, and computation time consumption of them shows a good advantage. Next, the influences of global troposphere- and ionosphere-constrained on the convergence time of SF Precise Point Positioning (PPP) were analyzed. It is verified that the ionosphere-constrained (TIC2) has significant influence on the convergence time in the horizontal and vertical components, while the troposphere-constrained (TIC1) has better effect on the convergence time in the vertical components within some thresholds. Of course, the dual constraint (TIC3) has the shortest average convergence time, which is at least 46.5% shorter in static mode and 5.4% in kinematic mode than standard SF PPP (TIC0).