Performance of linearly interpolated GPS clock corrections

Abstract

Precise satellite clock corrections are extremely important to Precise Point Positioning (PPP) applications using Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS), especially for applications in geosciences. The high-rate GPS clock corrections are required in the applications of geosciences with a high sampling rate (up to 5Hz). Therefore, the high-rate precise clock corrections of achieving high accuracy positioning resolution are in demand. Normally, the undifferenced phase and range observations are utilized to estimate satellite clock corrections with a global network. However, the processing is time-consuming and cumbersome due to a large number of parameters. For example, ambiguities are estimated together with clock corrections parameters. To achieve a trade-off between the high accuracy and the efficiency, the quality of linearly interpolated GPS clock corrections with different sample rates demands further investigation. We assessed the performance of the linearly interpolated GPS clock corrections with different sample rates and applied them into positioning. The results show that the difference of the positioning accuracy is below 1% for 2s, 5s, and 10s clock corrections and a slightly larger for 15s clock corrections, around 2%. However, the positioning accuracy can be improved by about 13% using the 1s sampling rate by comparing with the 30 s sampling rate.