Regularizing ill-posed problem of single-epoch precise GNSS positioning using an iterative procedure

Abstract

Abstract This paper analyses the regularization of an ill-conditioned mathematical model in a single-epoch precise GNSS positioning. The regularization parameter (RP) is selected as a parameter that minimizes the criterion of the Mean Squared Error (MSE) function. The crucial for RP estimation is to ensure stable initial least-squares (LS) estimates to replace the unknown quadratic matrix of actual values with the LS covariance matrix. For this purpose, two different data models are proposed, and two research scenarios are formed. Two regularized LS estimations are tested against the non-regularized LS approach. The first one is the classic regularization of LS estimation. In turn, the second one is its iterative counterpart. For the LS estimator of iterative regularization, regularized bias is significantly lower while the overall accuracy is improved in the sense of MSE. The regularized variance-covariance matrix of better precision can mitigate the impact of regularized bias on integer least-squares (ILS) estimation up to some extent. Therefore, iterative LS regularization is well-designed for single-epoch integer ambiguity resolution (AR). Nevertheless, the performance of the ILS estimator is studied in the context of the probability of correct integer AR in the presence of regularized bias.