Initial Assessment and Impact on GNSS Positioning Performance Analysis of Including BeiDou-3 Satellites

The global coverage of Chinese BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS) sets off into a new chapter as Beidou-3 (BDS-3) satellites entering dense launch period. In this paper, we assessed the GNSS positioning performance of including new BDS-3 satellites and BDS-3 satellites' B1I signal strength for the first time. Given that single-frequency receiver used by numbers of users, only the measurements on Ll\El\Bl were utilized in this paper. The datasets collected from GPS, Galileo, BeiDou-2 (BDS-2) and BDS-3 during two days, were employed to assess the signal strength of new BDS-3 B1I signal and initial positioning performance of Multi-constellation single point positioning (SPP) including BDS-3 satellites. The B1I signal of six new BDS-3 satellites was evaluated in terms of observed carrier-to-noise density ratio compared with GPS\Galileo\BDS-2 satellites. The carrier-to-noise density ratio results demonstrate that the signal strength of BDS-3 satellites above a minimum elevation angle of 10 degrees has an average level of 46 dbHz in our GNSS device. It is comparable to that of the most excellent GPS, Galileo and BDS-2 satellites. Furthermore, performance of SPP was evaluated according to Dilution of Precision (DOP), Horizontal and Vertical Positioning Error (HPE and VPE). The results indicate that including BDS-3 satellites, chosen according to their User Range Accuracy (URA), improves the DOP, HPE and VPE by an average of five, four, four percent and three, two, one percent over the GPS\BDS-2 and GPS\Galileo\BDS-2 positioning, respectively.