Antenna Group Delay Variation Bias Effect on Advanced RAIM

Abstract

This paper investigates the impact of the range error caused by the antenna group delay variations (noted as AGDV) on the advanced receiver autonomous integrity monitoring (ARAIM). The new multipath and AGDV error models for aviation use of new GPS and Galileo signals developed within the Dual Frequency Multipath Model for Aviation (DUFMAN) project and relevant AGDV measurements analyzed in DUFMAN [1], [2] are applied for the assessment of the impact. In this work, several approaches are taken to address the contribution of the AGDV error in the current ARAIM airborne algorithm: consideration of the user antenna bias error as a measurement bias term or as a random process sigma term. We performed ARAIM service volume simulations for Localizer Performance with Vertical guidance (LPV)-200 by applying the proposed error modeling methodologies and integrity support message (ISM) parameters in line with the current ARAIM framework. We compared availability performances as well as protection levels between the methods. It was found that 99.5% LPV-200 availability increased by approximately 5% when the newly derivedDUFMAN multipath and AGDV error models were applied. On the other hand, despite the maximum improvement of roughly one meter in the vertical protection level, the AGDV effect considered as the bias term in the worst-case sense appears to be marginal to the ARAIM availability performance.