Terrestrial precise positioning system using carrier phase from burst signals and optically distributed time and frequency reference

Abstract

Terrestrial positioning systems are being investigated as the complement to the global navigation satellite systems (GNSS), to provide precise and reliable positioning services in a GNSS-challenged environment. In this paper, we present the positioning performance of a ground-based positioning system, in which a multiband OFDM burst is used as a ranging signal to estimate carrier phase, and all transmitters are tightly synchronized by optically distributed time and frequency reference signals. The receiver, like in GNSS, runs on its own clock. An experiment has been carried out in an outdoor living lab environment to demonstrate the flexibility of precise positioning using carrier phase with the proposed ground-based system. During the experiment, the receiver was moved over a trajectory of 17 m forth and back, and acquired the ranging signal for 71 seconds. Without calibrating the different initial phase offsets among the transmitters, we keep the carrier phase cycle ambiguities as float numbers and compute the so called float position solutions. The root mean-squared error (RMSE) of the position solution in East and North direction are 4.22 cm and 4.63 cm, respectively, demonstrating the high-accuracy potential of the proposed burst oriented hybrid optical-wireless terrestrial positioning system.