Assessment of ionospheric corrections for PPP-RTK using regional ionosphere modelling

This paper presents an analysis of the ionospheric corrections required to get a significant improvement in PPP-RTK performance. The main aim was to determine the improvement in the position precision and time-to-first-fix in the PPP-RTK user side using ionospheric corrections computed from a network. The study consists of two main steps. The first one includes an empirical investigation of the ionosphere model precision necessary to greatly improve the PPP-RTK performance in a simulated environment in terms of precision and convergence time. In the second one, an optimal ionosphere representation was developed to provide precise ionospheric corrections by parameterizing the ionospheric slant delays after the PPP-RTK network processing in terms of ionosphere model coefficients and differential code biases using real GNSS measurements. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed methodology can be used for reliable regional ionosphere modeling and satellite code bias estimation, due to the consistency of the satellite code bias estimates with those provided from the International GNSS Service Analysis Centres, the high stability of the estimated receiver and satellite code biases and the low least-squares residuals of the network-based ionosphere modeling solution. Finally, it has been shown that the precision of ionospheric corrections at zenith needs to be better than 5 cm to enable faster PPP-RTK solutions.