Fusion Positioning of GNSS-Cellular Signals of Opportunity Under Low Observability

Abstract

Cellular signals of opportunity (CSOPs) can be utilized as a backup positioning system for global navigation satellite systems (GNSSs) in urban. Current studies on the fusion of GNSS-CSOPs require sufficient signals. However, in low-observability environments where the total number of visible signals does not exceed four, the existing GNSS-CSOPs pseudorange fusion methods lack robust strategies and have poor performance. In addition, GNSS-CSOPs are not spatiotemporally synchronized and have not yet been considered by current studies. Moreover, GNSS-CSOPs pseudorange measurements noise exhibit differences under the kinematic receiver, and this challenge has not been well dealt with by the existing weighting methods. To address the above-mentioned issues, a novel fusion positioning system based on an iterated extended Kalman filter (IEKF) for GNSS-CSOP is formulated under low observability, and the degree of observability is analyzed. In this system, the influence of spatiotemporal asynchronicity is addressed. Then, a Helmert unit variance estimation (HUVE) algorithm is proposed to obtain the measurement weights in GNSS-CSOPs fusion. Moreover, a double Dog-leg incremental estimation (DDIE) algorithm is proposed to enhance convergence when solving under low observability. In field tests, results show that the positioning accuracy of the proposed system can reach approximately 6.5 m under low observability. Compared with other state-of-the-art studies, such as weighting with power-of-signal, quasi-Newton (QN), Levenberg-Marquardt (LM), and Dog-leg methods, the performance of the proposed system has been improved by 62.4%, 82.4%, 72.9%, and 64.7%, respectively. This study presents a novel fusion positioning strategy for the GNSS-CSOP in low-observability environments.