A New Algorithm for High-Integrity Detection and Compensation of Dual-Frequency Cycle Slip under Severe Ionospheric Storm Conditions

Abstract

Many strategies for treating dual-frequency cycle slip, which can seriously affect the performance of a carrier-phase-based positioning system, have been studied over the years. However, the legacy method using the Melbourne-Wübbena (MW) combination and ionosphere combination is vulnerable to pseudorange multipath effects and high ionospheric storms. In this paper, we propose a robust algorithm to detect and repair dual-frequency cycle slip for the network-based real-time kinematic (RTK) system which generates high-precision corrections for users. Two independent and complementary carrier-phase combinations, called the ionospheric negative and positive combinations in this paper, are employed for avoiding insensitive pairs. In addition, they are treated as second-order time differences to reduce the impact of ionospheric delay even under severe ionospheric storm. We verified that the actual error distributions of these monitoring values can be sufficiently bounded by the normal Gaussian distribution. Consequently, we demonstrated that the proposed method ensures high-integrity performance with a maximum probability of missed detection of 7.5 × 10 ⁻⁹ under a desired false-alarm probability of 10 ⁻⁵. Furthermore, we introduce a LAMBDA-based cycle slip compensation method, which has a failure rate of 1.4 × 10 ⁻⁸. Through an algorithm verification test using data collected under a severe ionospheric storm, we confirmed that artificially inserted cycle slips are successfully detected and compensated for. Thus, the proposed method is confirmed to be effective for handling dual-frequency cycle slips of the network RTK system.