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Assessment of Several Interpolation Methods for Precise GPS Orbit

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 August 2007

Hamad Yousif
Affiliation:
(Ryerson University, Toronto)
Ahmed El-Rabbany*
Affiliation:
(Ryerson University, Toronto)
*
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Abstract

GPS applications such as Precise Point Positioning (PPP) require the availability of precise ephemeris at high rate. To support these applications, several institutions such as the International GNSS Service (IGS) have developed precise orbital service. Unfortunately, however, the data rate of such precise orbits is usually limited to 15 minutes. To overcome this problem, a number of orbital interpolation methods are proposed. This paper examines the performance of four interpolation methods for IGS precise GPS orbits, namely Lagrange, Newton Divided Difference, Cubic Spline and Trigonometric interpolation. In addition, the paper discusses a new approach, which utilizes the residuals between the broadcast and precise ephemeris to generate a high density precise ephemeris. It is shown that the new approach produces better results than previously reported orbital interpolation accuracy.

Information

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Navigation 2007
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Figure 1. Resulting error when taking the whole 24-hour data (i.e., 96 points) to build 96 Lagrange interpolating terms.

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Figure 2. Resulting error when taking 11 Lagrange terms.

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Figure 3. Resulting error when taking 9 Lagrange terms.

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Figure 4. Segmentation scheme – the 24-hour data is segmented into 23 overlapping segments of 9 terms each.

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Figure 5. Interpolation error when the GPS orbit is partitioned into smaller segments without overlapping.

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Figure 6. Interpolation error when the GPS orbit is segmented into overlapping segments.

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Table 1. Comparison between interpolation errors generated by partitioned vs. overlapping segmentation.

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Figure 7. Lagrange interpolation error for inertial GPS orbit.

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Figure 8. Lagrange interpolation error for ECEF GPS orbit.

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Table 2. Comparison between inertial vs. ECEF Lagrange interpolation error.

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Figure 9. Newton Divided Difference interpolation error for inertial GPS orbit.

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Figure 10. Newton Divided Difference interpolation error for ECEF GPS orbit.

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Figure 11. Cubic Spline interpolation error for GPS inertial orbit.

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Table 3. Statistics of trigonometric interpolation using different number of terms.

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Figure 12. Trigonometric interpolation error for GPS inertial orbit.

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Figure 13. Trigonometric interpolation error for GPS ECEF orbit.

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Figure 14. Interpolation error using the broadcast ephemeris.