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The demand for high-precision positioning has risen substantially in modern urban settings. In that regard, Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) offer several advantages such as global coverage, real-time capability, high accuracy, ease of use, and cost-effectiveness. The accuracy of GNSS-based positioning, however, suffers in urban environments due to signal blockage, reflection, and diffraction, which makes it difficult to fix ambiguities correctly within a real-time kinematic (RTK). To address this issue, this paper applies random sample consensus (RANSAC) to develop a novel single-epoch triple-frequency RTK positioning method. In our proposed method, the ambiguities of the extra-wide-lane, wide-lane, and original frequencies are resolved sequentially. RANSAC then detects and excludes incorrectly fixed ambiguities. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed method, two static experiments (cases 1 and 2) and one dynamic experiment (case 3) were conducted in representative urban areas. The findings demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms all comparative methods in positional availability, with comparable positional accuracy in terms of root-mean-square errors (RMSEs). In cases 1, 2, and 3, the proposed method achieves 3D RMSEs of 2.74, 4.29, and 20.35 cm, and the positional availabilities of 100%, 75.0%, and 73.1%, using a 10-degree mask angle (and a carrier-to-noise ratio (C/N0) threshold 35 dB-Hz). The corresponding RMSEs (positional availabilities) of comparative methods are from 1.51 to 4.04 cm (75.7 to 96.3%) in case 1, 4.19 to 7.78 cm (34.5 to 49.9%) in case 2, and 23.52 to 37.54 cm (15.4 to 33.9%) in case 3, respectively. Compared to these methods, the proposed method shows improvements of positional availabilities between 3.7 and 24.3 percentage points in case 1, between 25.1 and 40.5 percentage points in case 2, and between 39.2 and 57.7 percentage points in case 3. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The high-precision navigation and positioning with GNSS has become widely used in various applications with the development of new GNSS systems, such as BeiDou and Galileo. For marine applications, high-precision navigation and positioning with GNSS is still a challenge since the requirement of the communication link is a problem on sea. Both DGNSS and RTK require data communication between base station on land and the rover station on sea. The data communication can be performed by providers of the marine satellite communication service, such as Intelsat, Eutelsat, Telesat and the SpaceX. However, the cost is too high to be afforded by ordinary GNSS users. The BeiDou short-message service provides an efficient way for the data communication between reference station on land and rover station on sea. Each BeiDou message length is limited to 78 bytes, and the communication frequency is limited to 60 s. Based on the BeiDou short-message service, the high-precision positioning has been achieved in previous studies. However, multiple set of short-message devices are used and the cost is still high. In this research, based on dual-frequency GNSS data, we propose the high-precision navigation on sea with single set of short-message device. The space-relative and time-relative positioning methods are integrated to reduce the data requirements. That is, first, every minute precise position is acquired with traditional space-relative positioning method and then the position of the other epochs is derived with time-relative positioning method. The experimental results based on buoy observations on sea show that the navigation accuracy can reach up to cm level in both horizontal and vertical directions. The proposed method can meet the requirements of different marine applications such as tide monitoring and wave monitoring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The differential GPS (DGPS) performance can be affected by the ionospheric variability, especially in low-latitude areas. We evaluated the behavior of the ionospheric variability in low-latitude areas in the 11-year cycle of the solar activity. During periods of solar maximum, the percentage of the daily maximum gradient that exceeds 50 mm/km has reached 73 % in 2001. Assuming that the baseline length is 20 km, the gradient larger than 50 mm/km can lead to more than 1.0-m ranging error, which is significant if we want to achieve meter-level accuracy with DGPS. An ionospheric gradient model built from a number of reference stations is proposed for estimating the differential ionospheric delays. The effectiveness of the model is demonstrated under both the quiet and active ionospheric conditions in low-latitude areas. For a short baseline length of 16.9 km in Hong Kong, the horizontal positioning accuracy can be improved by 41 and 61 % during active solar years and geomagnetic storms, respectively. The improvements show that the model is capable of reducing the spatial decorrelation caused by the ionospheric variability, and the model can be used in DGPS especially over the regions, such as low-latitude areas, where the large ionospheric variability happens frequently. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Different approaches have been developed to monitor the integrity of the Global Positioning System (GPS). The individual approaches rely on conservative error bounds and faces great challenges in meeting stringent integrity requirements set by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO). These approaches, in fact, do not compete with one another but complement one another. We propose the vertical integration of the Satellite-Based Augmentation System (SBAS) and a local monitor station in this study. When the SBAS data deviate from the local monitor, users are informed to revert to the error bounds that are directly determined from SBAS data. Otherwise, the validation criterion that the error of the SBAS corrected solution is within a threshold is exploited to tighten the SBAS error bounds. The algorithm to integrate the SBAS with the independent monitor station is described, and its performance is evaluated based on simulations and real observations. The test results show that the vertical protection level (VPL) is reduced on average from 17.60 to 11.27 m, i.e., a 30.3% reduction in VPL while the integrity is guaranteed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]