Position Error Analysis of Carrier-based DGNSS Systems Under Ephemeris Fault Conditions

Abstract

The carrier-based differential global navigation satellite system (CD-GNSS) has been garnering significant attention as a promising technology for unmanned vehicles for its high accuracy. The CD-GNSS systems to be used for safety-critical applications should provide a certain level of integrity. The integrity of these systems must be analyzed under various conditions, including fault-free and satellite fault conditions. The systems should be able to detect the faults that can cause large biases on the user position errors and quantify the integrity risk by computing the protection level (PL) to protect the user against the faults that are left undetected. Prior work has derived and investigated the PL for the fault-free condition. In this study, the integrity of the CD-GNSS system under the fault condition is analyzed. The position errors caused by the satellite’s fault are compared with the fault-free PL (PL_H0) to verify whether the integrity requirement can be met without computing the PLs for the fault conditions. The simulations are conducted by assuming the ephemeris fault, and the position errors are evaluated by changing the size of the ephemeris faults that missed detection. It was confirmed that the existing fault monitors do not guarantee that the position error under the fault condition does not exceed the PL_H0. Further, the impact of the faults on the position errors is discussed.