Investigating the Impact of the Commercial GSM/GPRS Communications on the Availability of the Network Based RTK GNSS Service

Jose Aponte, Xiaolin Meng, Terry Moore, Chris Hill, Mark Burbidge

Abstract:	Wireless communications employed in a Network Realtime Kinematic (NRTK) GNSS system in order to deliver the network corrections to the rover users plays a vital role for achieving good performance of NRTK positioning. The communication link used for this task must ensure high flexibility and availability to satisfy the requirement of centimetric positioning accuracy and mobility that NRTK can offer. The centimetric accuracy that can be achieved with NRTK GPS directly depends on whether the network corrections are correctly received at a rover receiver. Since the advent of the GPRS communication technology, it has been used as the best option to deliver the NRTK corrections to the users and therefore it directly impacts the availability and general performance of the NRTK service. In the past commercial mobile phone network companies did not offer to their subscribers the specialized ‘only data’ transmission services through GPRS. Therefore, normal mobile phone SIM cards for voice and data had to be used for the transmission of the NRTK corrections. The use of these cards was degrading the availability of the NRTK service by interrupting the communications between the network control centre and the users after long periods of connection and also when priority was given to voice calls. The increase in the demand of services such as mobile Internet and machine to machine (M2M) data transmission using GPRS have seen the wide use of new SIM cards with fixed or dynamic IP addresses which are specially designed for data transmission purpose through GPRS. The impact of the GPRS communications using fixed and dynamic IP addresses over the availability of the NRTK is evaluated in this paper. Test results shows the improvements in the stability of the NRTK service when using the fixed IP SIM cards for long period of observations (>24 hr) and a high availability of the service with both types of SIM cards (> 99%).
Published in:	Proceedings of the 21st International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS 2008) September 16 - 19, 2008 Savannah International Convention Center Savannah, GA
Pages:	406 - 411
Cite this article:	Aponte, Jose, Meng, Xiaolin, Moore, Terry, Hill, Chris, Burbidge, Mark, "Investigating the Impact of the Commercial GSM/GPRS Communications on the Availability of the Network Based RTK GNSS Service," Proceedings of the 21st International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS 2008), Savannah, GA, September 2008, pp. 406-411.
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