Combining the GPS/Galileo/BDS-3 signals on overlap frequencies for interoperable multipath hemispherical maps

Multipath remains one of the major challenges in high-precision GNSS positioning. The multipath hemispherical map (MHM) based on satellites’ location repeatability in space is a popular method to mitigate GNSS multipath effects, but its performance depends on the availability of sufficient satellite orbital tracks in the skyplot. For instance, for BDS-3 medium Earth orbiters and Galileo satellites with 7-day and 10-day orbital repeat times, respectively, the skyplot of their orbital tracks will be too sparse to cover the shifting orbital tracks on the succeeding days, if only a few days of observations are used to construct MHMs. In this study, we establish an interoperable MHM using the overlap frequency signals of GPS, Galileo and BDS-3 (i.e., GPS L1/L5, Galileo E1/E5a and BDS-3 B1C/B2a). We compared the performance of GPS/Galileo/BDS-3 MHM (i.e., MP_GEC) and single-constellation MHMs (i.e., MP_G, MP_E and MP_C). The mean reduction rates of the L1/E1/B1C and L5/E5a/B2a carrier-phase residuals for the MP_GEC applied to GPS, Galileo and BDS-3 are 36% and 48%, respectively, which are 10–30% points larger compared to the MP_G, MP_E and MP_C. The MP_GEC constructed using 4 days of observations reduced the Galileo RMS positioning errors by 26%, 31% and 29% for the east, north, and up components, respectively, showing improvements of about 16, 18 and 17% points compared to the MP_E, and even approaching the RMS errors of the MP_E constructed using 10 days of observations. The results show that the interoperable GPS/Galileo/BDS-3 MHM is able to improve the spatial resolution, modeling efficiency and correction performance in mitigating multipath effects for high-precision GNSS positioning.