The Benefits of Receiver Clock Modelling in Satellite Timing

Abstract

Satellite timing is an effective and convenient method that has been widely accepted in the time community. The key to satellite timing is obtaining a clean receiver clock offset. In this paper, instead of regarding the receiver clock offset as white noise, a two-state stochastic clock model involving three kinds of noise was conceived and used in PPP filter estimation. The influence of clock type and sampling time on satellite timing performance was first analysed. In addition, the kinematic scheme and static scheme were both investigated for meeting the demands of multi-occasional users. The values show that the model works well for both the kinematic scheme and static scheme; in contrast to that of the white noise model, the timing stability is enhanced at all the sampling times. For the six stations, especially when the averaging time is less than 1000 s, the average stability improvement values of the kinematic scheme are 75.53, 43.24, 75.00, 69.05, 40.57, and 25.45%, and the average improvement values of the static scheme are 65.49, 77.94, 56.71, 60.78, 64.41, and 39.41%. Furthermore, the enhancement magnitude is related to clock type. For a high-stability clock, the improvement of the kinematic scheme is greater than that of the static scheme, whereas for a low-stability clock, the improvement of the kinematic scheme is less than that of the static scheme.