Architecture Design for Maritime Centimeter-Level GNSS Augmentation Service and Initial Experimental Results on Testbed Network

In this paper, we overview the system development status of the national maritime precise point positioning-real-time kinematic (PPP-RTK) service in Korea, also known as the Precise POsitioning and INTegrity monitoring (POINT) system. The development of the POINT service began in 2020, and the open service is scheduled to start in 2025. The architecture of the POINT system is composed of three provider-side facilities-a reference station, monitoring station, and central control station-and one user-side receiver platform. Here, we propose the detailed functionality of each component considering unidirectional broadcasting of augmentation data. To meet the centimeter-level user positioning accuracy in maritime coverage, new reference stations were installed. Each reference station operates with a dual receiver and dual antenna to reduce the risk of malfunctioning, which can deteriorate the availability of the POINT service. The initial experimental results of a testbed from corrections generated from the testbed network, including newly installed reference stations, are presented. The results show that the horizontal and vertical accuracies satisfy 2.63 cm and 5.77 cm, respectively. For the purpose of (near) real-time broadcasting of POINT correction data, we designed a correction message format including satellite orbit, satellite clock, satellite signal bias, ionospheric delay, tropospheric delay, and coordinate transformation parameters. The (near) real-time experimental setup utilizing (near) real-time processing of testbed network data and the designed message format are proposed for future testing and verification of the system.