Assessment of Position Degradation Due to Intermittent Broadcast of RTK MSM Correction Under Various Conditions

GNSS has been evolving dramatically in recent years. There are currently 6 GNSS (4 GNSS, AND 2 RNSS) constellations, which are GPS (USA), GLONASS (Russia), BeiDou (China), Galileo (EU), QZSS (Japan), and IRNSS (India). The Number of navigation satellites is expected to be over 150 by 2020. As the number of both constellations and satellites used for the improvement of positioning performance, high accuracy, and robustness of precise positioning is more promising. However, a large amount of the correction messages is required to support the augmentation system for the available satellites of all the constellations. Since bandwidth for the correction messages is generally limited, sending or scheduling the correction messages might be a critical issue in the near future. In this study, we analyze the relationship between the size of the bandwidth and Real-Time Kinematics (RTK) performance. Multiple Signal Messages (MSM), the only Radio Technical Commission for Maritimes (RTCM) message that supports multi-constellation GNSS, has been used for this assessment. Instead of the conventional method that broadcasts all the messages at the same time, we assign the MSM broadcasting interval for each constellation in 5 seconds. An open sky static and dynamic test for this study was conducted on the roof of Sejong University. Our results show that the RTK fixed position accuracy is not affected by the 5-second interval corrections, but the ambiguity fixing rate is degraded for poor DOP cases when RTK correction are transmitted intermittently.