Analysis of a clock-aided global navigation satellite system (GNSS)

This paper presents a dilution of precision (DOP) analysis of a clock-aided global navigation satellite system (GNSS). Firstly, the analysis shows that a best linear unbiased estimator should be used in the clock-aided GNSS to get the best improvements in accuracy. Secondly, the influence of the clock on vertical DOP (VDOP) and horizontal DOP (HDOP) is analysed by using the clock characteristics as a weighting matrix. The analysis highlights quantitative improvements in the VDOP and HDOP and explains why improvements in the VDOP are superior to those of the HDOP in the clock-aided GNSS. Finally, the paper analyses how incorrectly known a priori clock variances degrade the level of accuracy and offers guidelines for determining a weighting matrix in the cases where the clock characteristics are not clearly known.