Engineering Proceedings (Oct 2023)

Performance Improvement Provided by Global Navigation Satellite System Foresight Geospatial Augmentation in Deep Urban Environments

  • Esther Anyaegbu,
  • Paul Hansen,
  • Bo Peng

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3390/ENC2023-15444
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 54, no. 1
p. 58

Abstract

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Global navigation satellite systems (GNSSs) are an integral part of global positioning. However, because GNSS performance is impacted by signal obscuration and the presence of multipath in urban and deep urban environments, it is not accurate, reliable, and widely available enough to be a standalone system in all environments. This creates two problems: (1) the GNSS user does not know when or where GNSS performance may be degraded and (2) the GNSS user has limited ability to mitigate these issues. No mitigation strategy exists to improve the availability of GNSSs themselves. Inertial measurement units (IMUs) and sensor fusion provide other costly methods to improve positioning performance, but most systems still rely on GNSSs for absolute position. Spirent’s GNSS Foresight service aims to solve both issues. As a cloud-based solution, GNSS Foresight provides satellite and signal information, and this can be employed to support the decision-making strategy and calculations in the GNSS receiver to improve its positioning solution performance, integrity, and reliability. In this paper, GNSS Foresight is introduced, and a performance evaluation of GNSS Foresight in dense urban areas is presented. Using the data collected from two urban areas in North America, we evaluated GNSS Foresight and compared the performance of GNSS positioning solutions with and without Foresight-aided data. The comparison results show the observed improvements in GNSS receiver operation. Foresight can also be used to develop measurement engine performance enhancements in the acquisition of new satellites and the tracking/re-acquisition of current satellites using line-of-sight (LOS) satellite information. In the positional computation process, Foresight enables receivers to prioritize LOS signals over degraded non-line-of-sight (NLOS) signals, hence significantly reducing positioning errors and outperforming conventional GNSS positioning, particularly in difficult urban environments.

Keywords