Kalman filter based estimation of differential hardware biases with triangular interpolation technique for IRNSS

Ionosphere delay correction is the main error correction to the computation of single frequency user position using satellite navigation. However ionosphere delay consists of not only delay but also frequency dependent differential hardware biases from satellite and receiver ends. For ionosphere point of view, Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System (IRNSS) service area comes in equatorial anomaly region. It is a unique satellite navigation system which operates at L5 and S frequencies and consists of Geostationary Earth Orbit (GEO) and Geo Synchronous Orbit (GSO) satellite constellation. With IRNSS measurements availability, there is a good opportunity to estimate and analyse differential hardware biases with GEO/GSO combination and with equatorial ionosphere variation. In this paper, Kalman filter based estimation with triangular interpolation technique is used to estimate differential hardware biases for all IRNSS satellites and reference receivers at L5 frequency. The standard deviation of the 15?days of daily estimation of satellite differential hardware biases is in the range of 0.32 to 1.17 TECU for all IRNSS satellites. Similarly, the standard deviation of the 15?days of daily estimation varies up to 2.85 and 6.0 TECU for receiver differential hardware biases during calm and stormy period respectively. The ionosphere delay computed using estimated differential hardware biases is compared with Global Ionosphere Map (GIM) data. A rigorous analysis is carried out to study the error in the estimation in terms of input data noise level, satellite constellation and effect of latitude. Our result reveals that over IRNSS service area, there is an exponential increase in the error in the estimation of receiver differential hardware biases with respect to latitude.