Single Point Positioning Using GPS, GLONASS and BeiDou Satellites

Abstract

This paper introduces the Chinese BeiDou satellite system and its comparison with the actual completed American GPS and the Russian GLONASS systems. The actual BeiDou system consists of 14 satellites covering totally the Asia-Pacific area. A Single Point Positioning (SPP) test has been realised in Changsha, Hunan province, China, to show the advantage of using combined pseudorange solutions from these 3 satellite navigation systems especially in obstructed sites. The test shows that, with an elevation mask angle of 10 ° , the accuracy is improved by about 20% in horizontal coordinates and nearly 50% in the vertical component using the simultaneous observations of the 3 systems compared to the GPS/GLONASS solution. For the processing with an elevation mask angle of 30 ° , most of the time less than 4 GPS satellites were available for the GPS-only case and no solution was possible. However, in this difficult situation, the combined GPS/GLONASS/ BeiDou solutions provided an accuracy (rms values) of about 5 m.