An Investigation of Galileo Contribution on the Relative Point Positioning

Abstract

Original scientific papersToday, point coordinates are determined by Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS). Relative positioning methods are widely preferred in applications requiring high accuracy. Different satellite configurations are used to obtain raw measurements and process these measurements with relative positioning methods. While only GPS (G) was used at first, point coordinates have started to be determined with global satellite systems such as GLONASS (R), Galileo (E) and BeIDOU (C) developed by different institutions and organizations over time. In this study, the effect of Galileo on point positioning and positioning accuracies were investigated. In this context, a geodetic network consisting of 6 International GNSS Services-Multi-GNSS Experiment (IGS-MGEX) stations was used. The 31-day (01-31.08.2017) 24-hour RINEX data of the selected stations was processed in the Bernese v5.2 GNSS software with the double differences method in GPS (G),GPS+GLONASS (G+R) and GPS+GLONASS+Galileo (G+R+E). In the comparison, the coordinates obtained by shifting the coordinates of ITRF2014 (2010.00 reference epoch) to the measurement epoch with the velocities are taken as true quantity values. Then, the root square errors (KOH) and positioning accuracies in the directions of the coordinate axes were calculated and compared with each other statistically. As a result of the comparison, it was determined that the positioning accuracies obtained with the G, G+R and G+R+E satellite configurations were compatible with each other at the 95% confidence interval.