An offshore real-time precise point positioning technique based on a single set of BeiDou short-message communication devices

Real-time precise point positioning (PPP) based on open-access real-time service (RTS) of the international GNSS service (IGS) has attracted increasing attention in recent years. For offshore applications, the receiving of RTS corrections becomes a major obstacle due to lack of internet-based infrastructures. Short-message communication (SMC) is a particular technique of BeiDou navigation satellite system (BDS), which can provide bidirectional communication between users in a cost-effective way. However, the limited bandwidth and frequency of BDS SMC make it impossible to directly broadcast IGS RTS corrections with BDS SMC. An offshore real-time PPP technique is proposed based on IGS RTS corrections with a single set of BDS SMC devices for communication. RTS orbit corrections in the along-track, cross-track and radial directions, the clock correction and the code bias correction of each satellite are together converted into an equivalent range correction on the basis of user approximate position and will-be-used code observation types. The range corrections within 1 min are fitted into a first-order polynomial. Only the range and range-rate corrections at the reference time are broadcast with BDS SMC. In addition, different from broadcasting corrections of all satellites in the IGS RTS, corrections of only visible satellites are encoded into a BDS SMC correction message to further reduce the data size. The encoding strategy of BDS SMC correction message and a detailed procedure of the offshore real-time PPP technique are presented. The land-simulated and offshore experiment results show that the proposed technique can meet the demands of high-precision offshore applications.