Comparison of measurement and position domain multipath filtering techniques with the repeatable GPS orbits for static antennas

Abstract Repeatable satellite orbits can be used for multipath mitigation in Global Position System (GPS) based deformation monitoring and other high precision GPS applications that involve continuous observation with static antennas. Multipath signals repeat when the GPS constellation does. There are two possible domains for repeat-time based multipath filtering. One is based on filtering multipath errors in the measurements and the other on filtering multipath contaminated positioning errors. If all satellites have the same repeat time, the performance in the two domains should be very similar. However, the repeat time for individual satellite may be different and this leads to possible differences in performance in the two filtering domains. The aim of this paper is to assess the performance of the two filtering domains on multipath mitigation for short baselines. Three roof-top data sets collected at University College London and a data set collected at two International GNSS Service high-rate stations are used in our performance assessment. Test results are analysed and insights into the two filtering domains are described in details in the paper. Our overall result shows that the performances of the two filtering domains on multipath mitigation are similar, which is about 40% improvement on positioning accuracy when comparing with no multipath filtering.