User-level reliability monitoring in urban personal satellite-navigation

Monitoring the reliability of the obtained user position is of great importance, especially when using the global positioning system (GPS) as a standalone system. In the work presented here, we discuss reliability testing, reliability enhancement, and quality control for global navigation satellite system (GNSS) positioning. Reliability testing usually relies on statistical tests for receiver autonomous integrity monitoring (RAIM) and fault detection and exclusion (FDE). It is here extended by including an assessment of the redundancy and the geometry of the obtained user position solution. The reliability enhancement discussed here includes rejection of possible outliers, and the use of a robust estimator, namely a modified Danish method. We draw special attention to navigation applications in degraded signal-environments such as indoors where typically multiple errors occur simultaneously. The results of applying the discussed methods to high-sensitivity GPS data from an indoor experiment demonstrate that weighted estimation, FDE, and quality control yield a significant improvement in reliability and accuracy. The accuracy actually obtained was by 40% better than with equal weights and no FDE; the rms value of horizontal errors was reduced from 15 m to 9 m, and the maximum horizontal errors were largely reduced.