High Altitude Platform Station (HAPS)-Aided GNSS for Urban Areas

TL;DR

This paper investigates how High Altitude Platform Stations (HAPS) can enhance GNSS positioning accuracy in urban areas through simulations and experiments, addressing current limitations in civilian positioning performance.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of using HAPS as an additional ranging source to improve GNSS accuracy in challenging environments, supported by both simulation and physical experiments.

Findings

HAPS improves horizontal dilution of precision (HDOP) in urban areas.

HAPS enhances 3D positioning accuracy.

Simulation results depend on receiver clock offset estimation.

Abstract

Today the global averaged civilian positioning accuracy is still at meter level for all existing Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSSs), and the civilian positioning performance is even worse in regions such as the Arctic region and the urban areas. In this work, we examine the positioning performance of the High Altitude Platform Station (HAPS)-aided GPS system in an urban area via both simulation and physical experiment. HAPS can support GNSS in many ways, herein we treat the HAPS as an additional ranging source. From both simulation and experiment results, we can observe that HAPS can improve the horizontal dilution of precision (HDOP) and the 3D positioning accuracy. The simulated positioning performance of the HAPS-aided GPS system is subject to the estimation accuracy of the receiver clock offset. This work also presents the future work and challenges in modelling the pseudorange of HAPS.