amethodtoguaranteethecontinuityofgps.doc

A METHOD TO GUARANTEE THE CONTINUITY OF GPS IN URBAN ENVIRONMENTS Fatih ?enesiz1,Halis Saka2,Selman Nas3,Cihangir ?z?aml?4 1Department of Computer Engineering,Gebze Institue of Technology, Kocaeli, Turkey 2Department of Geodesy and Fotogrametry, Gebze Institue of Technology, Kocaeli, Turkey 3Department of Astronoutical Engineering, Istanbul Tecnical University, Istanbul, Turkey 4Department of Geodesy and Fotogrametry, Istanbul Tecnical University, Istanbul, Turkey The Global Positioning System (GPS) is the most famous navigation system in todays transportation world. It supplies any moving object with highly accurate position information in all over the world. But the performance of GPS decreases in urban areas where it is not always possible to track the necessary number of satellites to calculate the 3-D position. This paper outlines the new analytical approaches to overcome the discontinuity problems and as a result to increase the performance of GPS in metropolitan cities. To be able to compute the 4 unknowns of the system (3-D position parameters, and the receiver clock bias) in case 4 satellites are not available, the system is supplied with additional external information. 1.INTRODUCTION In navigation solution we have four unknowns to be solved. These are the position of the receiver antenna which is generally expressed in Earth Centered Earth Fixed (ECEF) coordinate system, and the receiver clock offset. In order to solve such a system we have to have at least four linear equations. This is possible only if the receiver can get signals from at least four satellites simultaneously. When more than four satellites visible, various statistical techniques can be used to solve the system for the best results. The two famous techniques are Least Square Adjustment (LSA) and Kalman Filtering (KF). When the situation is reverse, that is less than four satellites are visible, the complete solution can not be achieved for four unknowns. In such a situation two possi