Time and frequency transfer using Satellite Based Augmentation System GAGAN

Satellite-Based Augmentation System (SBAS) is essential to support aircraft navigation. L1 SBAS operates on the L1 frequency (1575.42 MHz) and is currently still of interest since all GNSS satellites and receivers do not fully support additional frequencies such as L5 (1176.45 MHz). Although the Global Positioning System (GPS) aided Geo Augmented Navigation (GAGAN) SBAS is available, the performances are degraded due to the discrepancies of the ionospheric correction over Thailand and surrounding areas. Hence, in this work, we propose a new method based on the geometry-free ionospheric delay estimation with a single frequency (L1) and a single reference station requirement. The local ionospheric delays are estimated based on the proposed method with the observed GPS and GAGAN data in Thailand. Then the ionospheric corrections are obtained from the estimated local ionospheric delays. The analysis shows that using the estimated corrections, the positioning errors are reduced both on quiet days and locally disturbed days in 2019. More reductions in the positioning errors are found in September and December than other months. In addition, we perform a preliminary availability assessment of two critical phases of flights. The GAGAN performances with the proposed method for the APV-I and LPV-200 categories are improved up to 57% and 53%, respectively, in comparison with the baseline method of the IGP correction.

This study presents an Android-based cooperative positioning (CP) architecture to improve the GNSS positioning performance on mobile devices. SBAS (Satellite Based Augmentation System) augmentation increases positioning accuracies significantly by sharing corrections between SBAS-enabled and non-capable devices via wireless connection or using a central server. The Indian GAGAN (GPS Aided GEO Augmented Navigation) is employed and assessed in the experiments. If GAGAN corrections are applied, all three chosen mobile devices showed a positioning accuracy improvement of around 95 %. The average 2D RSME was reduced from 75.23 to 1.35 m for the single-frequency GNSS smartphone Xiaomi Redmi Note 8 and from 33.25 to 1.62 m for the dual-frequency Google Pixel 4. As expected, the third GIS mapping device, Stonex S70 tablet, showed the highest performance, achieving sub-meter positioning accuracies. Thus, the experiment has proven the suitability of GAGAN augmentation for mobile devices, providing positive insight for further development of the CP architecture.

The solar eclipse and its associated ionospheric TEC variations over Indian stations on January 15, 2010

This paper evaluates the potential capacity of Receiver Autonomous Integrity Monitoring (RAIM) algorithms for Global Positioning System (GPS) and GPS Aided GEO Augmented Navigation (GAGAN) to support approach and landing phases of flight with vertical guidance. As the traditional RAIM does not support vertical guidance, Advanced RAIM (ARAIM) with potential to achieve worldwide coverage of vertical guidance, is used. These algorithms have focused on the Horizontal Protection Level (HPL) and Vertical Protection Level (VPL). User position is computed by detecting and excluding faults within the navigation solution and position accuracies are also provided. It is found that using RAIM, Position Dilution of Precision (PDOP) mean was good (1.5674) and Position Error (PE) was estimated to be 9.4042m with Fault Detection and Exclusion (FDE) implementation. While on the other hand, to increase horizontal and vertical accuracies, Advanced RAIM algorithm is implemented using GPS and GAGAN data. In case of GPS, Horizontal Protection Error (HPE) mean is 32.8541m and Vertical Protection Error (VPE) mean is 19.9901m. In case of GAGAN, HPE mean is 2.7190m and VPE mean is 3.3010m, thus achieving 95 percent accuracy requirement.

The BeiDou global satellite navigation system (BDS) is an important tool for precise remote time and frequency transfer. The current day-boundary discontinuity in the data process of the BDS-3 carrier phase (CP) time transfer limits the exploitation of the full potential of the BeiDou system, particularly over extended periods (e.g. >1 day). This study focused on the daily discontinuities in BDS-3 ground time and frequency transfer induced by the current satellite orbit and clock products from the individual Multi-GNSS experiment (MGEX) analysis center. An interpolation approach that bridges the daily jump of satellite products is proposed to improve the continuity of BDS-3 time and frequency transfer when using the CP technique. Only third-order polynomial is required to smooth and bridge the impact of the daily jump for medium earth orbit (MEO) and inclined geosynchronous satellite orbit (IGSO) satellite products. Eight MGEX network stations equipped with various types of receivers and antennas with dual-frequency BDS-3 signals were used to establish four time transfer links (i.e. BRUX – PTBB, AMC4–HOB2, LCK4–USUD, and ONS1–LCK3) and evaluate their effectiveness. These results reveal that the current BDS-3 satellite product discontinuity from individual analysis center easily caused the drift of phase residuals near the day-boundary epoch, with mean amplitudes of 0.081 m and 0.434 m for MEO and IGSO satellite products, respectively. The proposed approach can contribute to effectively eliminating this drift in time and frequency transfer. Furthermore, it achieved a noticeable reduction in the percentage of negative day-boundary discontinuities in BDS-3 ground time and frequency transfer results. The average values of the jump were 0.143 ns, 0.367 ns, 0.138 ns, and 0.131 ns for the BRUX – PTBB, AMC4–HOB2, LCK4–USUD, and ONS1–LCK3 time links, respectively, representing improvements of 11.4%, 40.5%, 4.5%, and 12.0%, respectively, compared with the traditional approach.

We provided an overview of various satellite-based augmentation systems (SBAS) options for augmented GNSS services in Australia, and potentially New Zealand, with the aim to tease out key similarities and differences in their augmentation capabilities. SBAS can technically be classified into two user categories, namely SBAS for aviation and "non-aviation" SBAS. Aviation SBAS is an International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) certified civil aviation safety-critical system providing wide-area GNSS augmentation by broadcasting augmentation information using geostationary satellites. The primary aim was to improve integrity, availability and accuracy of basic GNSS signals for aircraft navigation. On the other hand, "non-aviation" SBAS support numerous GNSS applications using positioning techniques such as wide-area differential-GNSS (DGNSS) and precise point positioning (PPP). These services mainly focus on delivering high-accuracy positioning solutions and guaranteed levels of availability, and integrity remains secondary considerations. Next-generation GNSS satellites capable of transmitting augmentation signals in the L1, L5 and L6 frequency bands will also be explored. These augmentation signals have the data capacity to deliver a range of augmentation services such as SBAS, wide-area DGNSS and PPP, to meet the demands of various industry sectors. In addition, there are well-developed plans to put in place next-generation dual-frequency multi-constellation SBAS for aviation. Multi-constellation GNSS increases robustness against potential degradation of core satellite constellations and extends the service coverage area. It is expected that next-generation SBAS and GNSS will improve accuracy, integrity, availability and continuity of GNSS performance.

The model of BDS/GPS carrier phase time and frequency transfer is given in this paper, and the transformation method of time and coordinate reference are researched. Adopting precise satellite orbits and clocks provided by GFZ, data from MGEX are processed to analysis the performance of BDS/GPS carrier phase time and frequency transfer. The results show that the precision of BDS/GPS carrier phase time and frequency transfer is not better than the single system obviously when the visible satellites are more than 7. BDS convergence time is significantly longer than GPS and BDS/GPS, due to fewer MEO satellites. The influence for single system time and frequency transfer is more obvious than BDS/GPS under complex environment. When the elevation mask angle is over 30°, BDS have better performance than GPS due to BDS’s special constellation in asian-pacific region, and GPS time transfer results are nonsequence. When the elevation mask angle is over 40°, BDS time transfer is also nonsequence at sometime, and GPS cannot be used for time transfer, but BDS/GPS is still get the high precision results; the convergence speed and stability are better than the single system.

Combining GPS and TWSTFT considerably increases the robustness of the accurate time transfer result due to the complete independence between these two spatial techniques. In this paper we present the last improvements of a time and frequency transfer method based on a least-square analysis of GPS code and carrier phase measurements in common view, constrained by TWSTFT data. The combined method developed here provides a time transfer solution which benefits from the high short-term stability and high resolution of the GPS data and the high accuracy of the TWSTFT data. It allows to solve the large day boundary discontinuities that exist in some clock solutions obtained with geodetic time transfer, but some discontinuities appear occasionally in the CV+TW solution, due to the noise and diurnal perturbation in the TWSTFT data.

GPS time transfer is usually carried out with C/A code measurements using the common-view technique. An uncertainty of a few nanoseconds can be obtained for an integration time of about 1000 seconds when ionospheric measurements and precise orbits are used. This limits the capability of frequency comparison to the level of 3 parts in 10/sup 14/ for an integration time of one day. Recently new frequency standards have been developed that claim an accuracy at or below 1/spl times/10/sup -14/. For existing time transfer techniques it is a challenge to compare their frequency over a sufficiently short interval. Previous studies have already shown the potential of carrier-phase and P-code measurements from geodetic GPS receivers. This paper draws up tentative uncertainty budgets for clock frequency comparisons using phase and code measurements from commercially available dual-frequency and multi-channel GPS receivers. Although the level of noise involved in carrier phase measurements is two or three orders of magnitude lower than that of code measurements in the short term, other error sources such as tropospheric delay of GPS signals, multipath propagation and the phase ambiguity problem lead to a limitation in the accuracy of frequency transfer at the 10/sup -15/ level over an averaging time of one day. Carrier phase measurements, however, provide an improvement over the performance expected from code measurements for all averaging times smaller than one day.

Dual-frequency multi-constellation (DFMC) satellite-based augmentation system (SBAS) is a new SBAS standard for aeronautical navigation systems. It supports aircraft navigation from the enroute to approach phases via the L1 and L5 frequencies (1575.42 and 1176.45 MHz). Although the ionosphere-free (IF) combination in the DFMC SBAS operation removes the first-order ionospheric delays in the pseudorange measurement, remaining terms including the satellite-clock offset errors and higher-order ionospheric (HOI) delays are still unaccounted for. The DFMC SBAS accuracy and integrity can be affected by the HOI effects, especially during severe ionospheric disturbances. In this work, we present the local DFMC SBAS corrections with and without the mitigation of HOI delays. We first estimate the HOI delay terms using the received pseudorange followed by separate satellite and receiver bias estimations based on the minimum sum-variance technique. The integrity terms can then be obtained. The performances of DFMC SBAS using the global navigation satellite system (GNSS) data including GPS, Galileo, and QZSS are evaluated using obtained GNSS data at stations in Thailand on the ionospheric quiet and disturbed days. The results show that with the HOI mitigation, the vertical positioning errors (VPE) on the quiet and disturbed days can be improved by 12% and 9%, whereas the vertical protection levels (VPL) are improved by 16% and 21%, respectively. In addition, we perform a preliminary assessment of DFMC SBAS based on the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) requirements of two categories: Localizer Performance with Vertical guidance (LPV-200) and Category I precision approach (CAT-I) showing promising results.

The development of software based GNSS receivers is being rapidly revolutionized in satellite based navigation applications. In view of commencement of new satellite/ground based navigation systems such as Indian Regional Navigations Systems (IRNSS), GPS Aided Geo Augmented Navigation (GAGAN), China's COMPAS and pseduolites etc., the receiver technology is to be updated efficiently for high positional accuracy requirements under noisy environments. The main modules of software GPS receiver contain acquisition, tracking and position computations. Among them, acquisition is very important process for identifying satellites, which is based on spread spectrum technology. In this paper, Goertzel and Cooley-tukey FFT GPS acquisition algorithms are implemented for GPS L1 signals. The simulations results indicate that Cooley-tukey FFT GPS acquisition algorithm (Acquisition time: 18.32 seconds) is performed well as compared to the other algorithms.

The carrier phase (CP) technique based on the BeiDou Global Satellite Navigation System (BDS-3) has proven to be a crucial spatial tool for remote time and frequency transfer. The current CP technique models the receiver clock offset as a white noise stochastic process and easily absorbs some unmodeled errors, thus compromising the time and frequency transfer performance. To further improve the performance of time and frequency transfer, a new BDS-3 receiver clock estimation algorithm based on the epoch difference (ED) model is presented, and the mathematical principles and applied modes are discussed. The algorithm makes full use of both observations of the current epoch and practical variations of the receiver clock offset, further improving the performance of time and frequency transfer. Five Multi-Global Navigation Satellite System Experiment network stations equipped with various types of receivers and antennas with dual-frequency BDS-3 signals were used to establish four time transfer links (i.e., AMC4–PTBB, BRUX–PTBB, OP71–PTBB, and WTZS–PTBB) to evaluate their effectiveness. The ED model improves all the four time links in terms of noise level, with improvements of 17.0%, 18.3%, 20.3%, and 5.9%, respectively, when compared with the results from a non-ED model. The ED model outputs were better than the raw solutions in terms of frequency stability at all time links, particularly for average time intervals (tau) < 1000 s. The mean improvement was 8.1% for AMC4–PTBB, 16.1% for BRUX–PTBB, 10.0% for OP71–PTBB, and 18.6% for WTZS–PTBB when the average time (tau) was less than 1000 s.

Optical two-way time and frequency transfer (O-TWTFT) is an enabling technology that has applications ranging from fundamental investigations of relativity to the operation of global navigation satellite systems. Linear-optical-sampling (LOS) between optical frequency combs has been used to create very stable optical two-way time and frequency transfer links over free-space. Here, we demonstrate two-way time and frequency transfer using LOS between electro-optic frequency combs. This two-way electro-optic time and frequency transfer system demonstrated instabilities as low as 15 fs at 1 s of averaging time. These results show a pathway to highly stable, frequency agile, and low SWaP-C time transfer networks.

Over the past few years, atomic clocks have been improving and are now reaching stabilities and accuracies of a few parts in 1018 in fractional frequency. Fiber-based time and frequency transfer techniques have demonstrated excellent performance in the comparison of state-of-art optical atomic clocks over thousands of kilometers. For highly accurate time and frequency transfers, relativistic effects which affect the signal propagation in optical fibers, need to be taken into account. The most important is the Sagnac correction because of the computation complexity and also the non-reciprocity in the two-way time transfer. Sagnac correction is an important source of uncertainty in fiber-based time and frequency transfer. Besides, not all important parameters are known with sufficient precision when we compute the Sagnac correction such as the large position error of fiber nodes and also the sparse fiber nodes. It is necessary to evaluate the Sagnac correction due to imperfect knowledge of parameters. In our work, several simulation fiber links in China are analyzed as specific examples to evaluate the influences of imperfect knowledge on the accuracy of the time transfer. The results show that in order to ensure one picosecond precision of time transfer using optical fiber, position accuracy of nodes should be higher than 500 m when the information of enough number of nodes can be obtained.

Two-way satellite time and frequency transfer has become an important technical component in the process of the realization of International Atomic Time and also for comparisons among the best primary frequency standards. This paper contains results of studies aimed at improving the knowledge of the uncertainty for true time transfer between remote sites. Our study addresses mostly the collection of so-called time transfer triplets between sites 1, 2, and 3. Systematic deviations from zero in the combination (1-2) + (2-3) + (3-1) would point to incomplete understanding and handling of systematic offsets in the individual time transfers. We show that such offsets exist, but that they are only in specific cases significant (up to about 2 ns), and we discuss possible causes.