English

Satellite Positioning with Large Constellations

Signal Processing 2018-08-23 v1

Abstract

Modern global navigation satellite system receivers can access signals from several satellite constellations (including GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, BeiDou). Once these constellations are all fully operational, a typical receiver can expect to have on the order of 40-50 satellites in view. Motivated by that observation, this paper presents an asymptotic analysis of positioning algorithms in the large-constellation regime. We determine the exact asymptotic behavior for both pseudo-range and carrier-phase positioning. One interesting insight from our analysis is that the standard carrier-phase positioning approach based on resolving the carrier-phase integer ambiguities fails for large satellite constellations. Instead, we adopt a Bayesian approach, in which the ambiguities are treated as noise terms and not explicitly estimated.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1808.07117,
  title  = {Satellite Positioning with Large Constellations},
  author = {Urs Niesen and Olivier Leveque},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1808.07117},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

Presented in part at the 2018 Information Theory and Applications Workshop

R2 v1 2026-06-23T03:40:05.409Z