Preliminary Test Results of Compact Wide-Area RTK: A New Satellite-Based Augmentation System for Centimeter-Level Service

Donguk Kim, Minhuck Park, Changdon Kee

Abstract:	Recently, the demand for high-precision navigation systems for centimeter-level service has been growing rapidly for various GNSS applications. The network RTK (Real-Time Kinematic) is one of the candidate solution to provide high-accuracy position to user in real-time. However, the network RTK requires a lot of continuously operating reference stations to provide wide-area service for national or continental scales. Furthermore, it requires high-speed datalink for broadcasting their scalartype corrections. In this paper, we introduce a new concept called “Compact Wide-Area RTK (WARTK)” which provides centimeter-level positioning service on national or continental scales to overcoming the limitation of the legacy network RTK methods. Using the network of multiple reference stations whose distance is 200-1000 km, the Compact WARTK system generates three types of high-precision corrections: satellite orbit correction, satellite code/phase clock (CPC) correction, tropospheric correction. Separating each GPS error component into vector-forms, it is possible to broadcast their corrections over a wide-area using geosynchronous satellite with very low-speed data link under 500 bps. As the first paper introducing the Compact WARTK system, we mainly focuses on a satellite CPC correction generation algorithm. Unlike the conventional RTCM protocol which is very vulnerable to communication delay and failure, the compact WARTK corrections, which is generated based on multiple stations, are very robust against the latency and can be provided continuously even when a specific reference station is breakdown. Moreover, the quality of correction is enhanced even at low-elevation satellite. In order to evaluate the performance of the compact WARTK system, we conducted a preliminary test on mid-west and south USA with six reference station. Their baseline distance are 198 km to 921 km. As a result, the compact WARTK system has superior performance than the conventional RTCM protocol under communication delay and outage. It can still provide RTK even in 60 seconds time delay. In conclusion, the Compact WARTK system can provide centimeter-level positioning service within 1 minute to wide-area user while maintaining the hardware infrastructure of SBAS (Satellite-Based Augmentation System).
Published in:	Proceedings of the 32nd International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS+ 2019) September 16 - 20, 2019 Hyatt Regency Miami Miami, Florida
Pages:	3708 - 3716
Cite this article:	Kim, Donguk, Park, Minhuck, Kee, Changdon, "Preliminary Test Results of Compact Wide-Area RTK: A New Satellite-Based Augmentation System for Centimeter-Level Service," Proceedings of the 32nd International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS+ 2019), Miami, Florida, September 2019, pp. 3708-3716. https://doi.org/10.33012/2019.16978
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