BDS-3 Time Group Delay and Its Effect on Standard Point Positioning

Abstract

The development of the BeiDou navigation system (BDS) is divided into three phases: The demonstration system (BDS-1), the regional system (BDS-2) and the global BeiDou navigation system (BDS-3). At present, the construction of the global BeiDou navigation system (BDS-3) constellation network is progressing very smoothly. The signal design and functionality of BDS-3 are different from those of BDS-1 and BDS-2. The BDS-3 satellite not only broadcasts B1I (1561.098 MHz) and B3I (1268.52 MHz) signals but also broadcasts new signals B1C (1575.42 MHz) and B2a (1176.45 MHz). In this work, six tracking stations of the international GNSS monitoring and assessment system (iGMAS) were selected, and 41 consecutive days of observation data, were collected. To fully exploit the code observations of BDS-2 and BDS-3, the time group delay (TGD) correction model of BDS-2 and BDS-3 are described in detail. To further verify the efficacy of the broadcast TGD parameters in the broadcast ephemeris, the standard point positioning (SPP) of all the signals from BDS-2 and BDS-3 with and without TGD correction was studied. The experiments showed that the B1I SPP accuracy of BDS-2 was increased by approximately 50% in both the horizontal and vertical components, and B1I/B3I were improved by approximately 70% in the horizontal component and 47.4% in the vertical component with TGD correction. The root mean square (RMS) value of B1I and B1C from BDS-3 with TGD correction was enhanced by approximately 60%–70% in the horizontal component and by approximately 50% in the vertical component. The B2a-based SPP was increased by 60.2% and 64.4% in the east and north components, respectively, and the up component was increased by approximately 19.8%. For the B1I/B3I and B1C/B2a dual-frequency positioning accuracy with TGD correction, the improvement in the horizontal component ranges from 62.1% to 75.0%, and the vertical component was improved by approximately 45%. Furthermore, the positioning accuracy of the BDS-2 + BDS-3 combination constellation was obviously higher than that of BDS-2 or BDS-3.