Study of several interpolation schemes to provide ionospheric corrections for navigation

Abstract

Since the development of space based geodesic techniques, the increasing of the positioning accuracy has been a major goal. In this context, the effect of the ionosphere has been a key issue to be taken into account to improve the navigation results obtained using several types of receivers: from dual frequency phase receivers at distances greater than tens of kilometres of the nearest fixed site to single frequency code receivers. To overcome this problem, it is necessary either an accurate modelling of the ionosphere at the fixed stations and an optimum interpolation scheme for the rover receiver. This approach is either valid for single frequency users or rovers using dual frequency phase receiver. The current work studies the performance of different interpolation schemes such as linear interpolation and kriging, which can be implemented in a rover receiver in order to interpolate either the Slant Total Electron Content (from now on STEC) or the Double Differenced STEC from the transmitted corrections that are computed at the fixed stations.