Cooperative Positioning using Massive Differentiation of GNSS Pseudorange Measurements

With Differential GNSS (DGNSS), Single Differentiation (SD) of GNSS pseudorange mea- surements is computed with the aim of correcting harmful errors such as ionospheric and tropospheric delays. These errors can be mitigated to up to very few centimeters, which denotes a performance improvement with respect to the Standard Point Positioning (SPP) solution, widely used in GNSS receivers. However, with DGNSS it is necessary to have a very precise knowledge of the coordinates of a reference station in order to experience this performance improvement. We propose the Massive User-Centric Single Differentiation (MUCSD) algorithm, which is proven to have a comparable performance to DGNSS with- out the need of a reference station. Instead, N cooperative receivers which provide noisy observations of their position and clock bias are introduced in the model. The MUCSD algorithm is mathematically derived with an Iterative Weighted Least Squares (WLS) Estimator. The estimator lower bound is calculated with the Cramér-Rao Bound (CRB). Several scenarios are simulated to test the MUCSD algorithm with the MassiveCoop-Sim simulator. Results show that if the observations provided by the cooperative users have a noise of up to 10 meters, DGNSS performance can be obtained with N = 10. When observations are very noisy, the MUCSD performance still approaches DGNSS for high values of N.