Performance of GPS and Partially Deployed BeiDou for Real-Time Kinematic Positioning in Western Canada

Date
2015-01-29
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Abstract
China has completed the development of the first phase of its BeiDou satellite navigation system, which contains fourteen operational satellites at of the end of 2012. This thesis implements the Real-Time Kinematic (RTK) positioning using the integrated GPS and BeiDou system in comparison to the GPS-only system to evaluate whether current BeiDou, which is designed to provide regional coverage in the Asia-Pacific region, can augment the GPS system in North America. Three types of measurements, L1-only, L1 and L2, and Wide-lane combination, were tested over short (10 m), medium (20 km), and long (40 km) baselines to give a comprehensive performance analysis in terms of RTK positioning. The signal quality and measurement precision of BeiDou are presented and compared with those of GPS. The availability and geometry, float and fixed positioning accuracy, convergence time of float ambiguities, Time To First-Fix (TTFF) the ambiguities, and the actual success rate of the ambiguities for the GPS/BeiDou system and the GPS-only system are compared to analyze the improvements brought by the current BeiDou system. Results reveal that BeiDou measurements have the same level of precision as GPS. Adding BeiDou improves the float positioning accuracy and accelerates the convergence time of the ambiguities over three different baselines. The actual success rates are improved and the TTFFs are reduced by inducing BeiDou in the L1-only and L1 and L2 cases. The use of the wide-lane combination brings great improvements in the ambiguity resolution particularly over longer baselines. With the additional BeiDou measurements, the actual success rates do not improve since they all maintain at 100%, but the TTFFs are reduced greatly over the three baselines.
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Geotechnology
Citation
Dou, J. (2015). Performance of GPS and Partially Deployed BeiDou for Real-Time Kinematic Positioning in Western Canada (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/27299