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Improving vertical GPS precision with a GPS-over-fiber architecture and real-time relative delay calibration

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Abstract

A limitation of GPS positioning is that the vertical component is generally two to three times less precise than the horizontal components. In a previous work by R. Santerre of Laval University and G. Beutler of University of Bern, it was shown in simulations that it is possible to improve the GPS vertical positioning precision by using a multi-antenna GPS receiver and a precise calibration technique of the relative hardware delay between the antennas and the receiver. However, no actual implementation of the system was done to prove the concept until now. A new multi-antenna, GPS-over-fiber architecture with real-time delay monitoring, designed and implemented to improve the vertical precision is presented. The improvement in vertical precision arises from the elimination of the relative receiver clock error in single difference, between antennas, and the precision real-time calibration of the relative hardware delay. Experiments were conducted with a zero baseline and a short baseline configuration. The results show, as expected by the theory and the simulations, a two to three times improvement in the precision of the vertical component such that it reached the same level of performance as the horizontal components. These promising results will enable the use of this type of configuration in several applications where the same precision in all 3D components is essential and could not be achieved before with standard GPS positioning techniques.

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Acknowledgments

The research reported is a summary of the PhD research conducted by the main author under the supervision of the last three authors. The research has been carried out mainly under the financial support of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC). Financial support was also provided by the Faculty of Forestry, Geography and Geomatics of Laval University. The authors would like to thank all people who contributed, at different levels, to the realization of this project: Prof. Gerhard Beutler (University of Bern), Prof. Marc Cocard (Laval University) and Dr. Michel Poulain (TeraXion) for their valuable comments as members of the thesis examining committee; Bruno Sauriol, Marc-Antoine Fortin and Jean-Christophe Guay of the École de Technologie Supérieure (ÉTS) in Montreal for their work and help with the FPGA-based GPS receiver used in this research; Stéphanie Bourgon and Guy Montreuil for their support in the GPS processing software and field tests; Benoît Filion and Philippe Chrétien for their participation in the stage of designing and building the prototype of the GPS-over-fiber system.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Département des Sciences Géomatiques, Centre de recherche en géomatique, Université Laval, Québec, QC, G1V 0A6, Canada

    Daniel Macias-Valadez & Rock Santerre

  2. Département de Génie Électrique et de Génie Informatique, Centre d’optique, photonique et laser (COPL), Université Laval, Québec, QC, G1V 0A6, Canada

    Daniel Macias-Valadez & Sophie Larochelle

  3. Groupe de Recherche en Navigation (GRN), Département de Génie Électrique, École de Technologie Supérieure, Montréal, QC, H3C 1K3, Canada

    René Landry Jr.

Authors
  1. Daniel Macias-Valadez
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  2. Rock Santerre
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  3. Sophie Larochelle
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  4. René Landry Jr.
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Correspondence to Daniel Macias-Valadez.

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Macias-Valadez, D., Santerre, R., Larochelle, S. et al. Improving vertical GPS precision with a GPS-over-fiber architecture and real-time relative delay calibration. GPS Solut 16, 449–462 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10291-011-0244-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10291-011-0244-6

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