A New Approach to GPS Carrier-Phase Ambiguity Resolution Using a Reference Receiver Network

using multiple reference receivers for multipath reduction and improving carrier-phase ambiguity resolution. A new approach is presented for performing carrier-phase ambiguity resolution and precise positioning using a net-work of reference receivers. In this approach, a least-squares condition adjustment is performed which “encap-sulates ” the information from all of the reference receiv-ers into corrected code and carrier-phase measurements of a single reference receiver. As a result, there is only one set of carrier-phase ambiguities to be estimated. Standard carrier-phase ambiguity resolution can then be performed between the single corrected reference receiver and a mo-bile receiver, with an improvement in results due to the use of the reference network. This method is tested using a network of four dual-frequency reference receivers separated by 25–120 km. Applying the network-derived measurement corrections to the reference receiver reduces by about 50 % the time re-quired to correctly resolve the integer ambiguities. A dis-cussion of the strengths, limitations, and potential applica-tions of this method is also presented