Evaluation of ionospheric delay effects on multi-GNSS combined positioning performances

Abstract

Ionospheric delay is a significant error source in multi-GNSS positioning. We present different processing strategies to fully exploit the ionospheric delay effects on multi-frequency and multi-GNSS positioning performance, including standard point positioning (SPP) and precise point positioning (PPP) scenarios. Datasets collected from 10 stations over thirty consecutive days provided by multi-GNSS experiment (MGEX) stations were used for single-frequency SPP/PPP and dual-frequency PPP tests with quad-constellation signals. The experimental results show that for single-frequency SPP, the Global Ionosphere Maps (GIMs) correction achieves the best accuracy, and the accuracy of the Neustrelitz TEC model (NTCM) solution is better than that of the broadcast ionospheric model (BIM) in the E and U components. Eliminating ionospheric parameters by observation combination is equivalent to estimating the parameters in PPP. Compared with the single-frequency uncombined (UC) approach, the average convergence time of PPP with the external ionospheric models is reduced. The improvement in BIM-, NTCM- and GIM-constrained quad-constellation L2 single-frequency PPP was 15.2%, 24.8% and 28.6%, respectively. The improvement in convergence time of dual-frequency PPP with ionospheric models was different for different constellations and the GLONASS-only solution showed the least improvement. The improvement in the convergence time of BIM-, NTCM- and GIM-constrained quad-constellation L1/L2 dual-frequency PPP was 5.2%, 6.2% and 8.5%, respectively, compared with the UC solution. The positioning accuracy of PPP is slightly better with the ionosphere constraint and the performance of the GIM-constrained PPP is the best. The combination of multi-GNSS can effectively improve the positioning performance