Global and Regional Ionospheric Corrections for Faster PPP Convergence

Abstract

Rapid convergence of precise point positioning (PPP) solutions to cm‐level precision is a key factor for many applications. One means of accelerating this convergence is to exploit the benefit of information on the ionosphere. In order to preserve the integer nature of carrier‐phase ambiguities in PPP, it is imperative that ionospheric corrections be provided with a set of compatible satellite phase biases. When using the decoupled‐clock model, global ionospheric maps (GIMs) currently provided by the International GNSS Service are not directly applicable to PPP with ambiguity resolution. This paper describes a methodology for incorporating external ionospheric corrections into this model. It is shown that the use of both GIMs and ambiguity resolution can potentially reduce the convergence time of PPP to 10‐cm horizontal accuracies from 30 to 4.5 minutes (68^th percentile), while a regional network with inter‐station spacing of 150 km can reach this threshold instantaneously under favorable ionospheric conditions. © 2014 Her Majesty the Queen in Right of Canada. NAVIGATION. © 2014 the Institute of Navigation.