Improving the Stochastic Model of Ionospheric Delays for BDS Long-Range Real-Time Kinematic Positioning

Although ionosphere-free (IF) combination is usually employed in long-range precise positioning, in order to employ the knowledge of the spatiotemporal ionospheric delays variations and avoid the difficulty in choosing the IF combinations in case of triple-frequency data processing, using uncombined observations with proper ionospheric constraints is more beneficial. Yet, determining the appropriate power spectral density (PSD) of ionospheric delays is one of the most important issues in the uncombined processing, as the empirical methods cannot consider the actual ionosphere activities. The ionospheric delays derived from actual dual-frequency phase observations contain not only the real-time ionospheric delays variations, but also the observation noise which could be much larger than ionospheric delays changes over a very short time interval, so that the statistics of the ionospheric delays cannot be retrieved properly. Fortunately, the ionospheric delays variations and the observation noise behave in different ways, i.e., can be represented by random-walk and white noise process, respectively, so that they can be separated statistically. In this paper, we proposed an approach to determine the PSD of ionospheric delays for each satellite in real-time by denoising the ionospheric delay observations. Based on the relationship between the PSD, observation noise and the ionospheric observations, several aspects impacting the PSD calculation are investigated numerically and the optimal values are suggested. The proposed approach with the suggested optimal parameters is applied to the processing of three long-range baselines of 103 km, 175 km and 200 km with triple-frequency BDS data in both static and kinematic mode. The improvement in the first ambiguity fixing time (FAFT), the positioning accuracy and the estimated ionospheric delays are analysed and compared with that using empirical PSD. The results show that the FAFT can be shortened by at least 8% compared with using a unique empirical PSD for all satellites although it is even fine-tuned according to the actual observations and improved by 34% compared with that using PSD derived from ionospheric delay observations without denoising. Finally, the positioning performance of BDS three-frequency observations shows that the averaged FAFT is 226 s and 270 s, and the positioning accuracies after ambiguity fixing are 1 cm, 1 cm and 3 cm in the East, North and Up directions for static and 3 cm, 3 cm and 6 cm for kinematic mode, respectively.