A Comprehensive Signal Quality Assessment for BDS/Galileo/GPS Satellites and Signals

Abstract

With the modernization of global navigation satellite systems (GNSS), especially the rapid development of the BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS), more observations of satellites and signals have become available. Using data of the globally distributed MGEX stations, a systematic and comprehensive evaluation of signal characteristics for BDS-3, BDS-2, GPS, and Galileo is conducted in terms of carrier-to-noise ratio (C/N0), code noise, and multipath in the contribution. First, a comprehensive signal quality assessment method for BDS/Galileo/GPS satellites and signals is proposed, including C/N0 modeling and MP modeling. For BDS, the BDS-3 satellites apparently have higher signal power than the BDS-2 satellites at the same frequency such as B1I and B3I, and the signal B2a of BDS-3 is superior to other signals in regard to signal power, which is comparable with the superior Galileo E5 signals and GPS L5. Among all the signals, the observation accuracy of E5 is the highest regardless of receiver types, and next highest are BDS-3 B2a and GPS L5. Due to not being affected by the systematic code errors of BDS-2, the observations of BDS-3 satellites contain smaller multipath errors than that of BDS-2 satellites. As for the multipath suppression performance, the BDS-3 signal B2a, GPS L5, and Galileo E5 and E5b perform better than the other signals, which may be related to their wide signal bandwidths.