Positioning Performance Comparison Between GPS and BDS With Data Recorded at Four MGEX Stations

In December 2018, the BeiDou III (BDS-3) basic system was completed and began to provide global services. along with the BeiDou second-generation satellite navigation system (BDS-2) and Beidou first-generation satellite navigation system (BDS-1), the whole BDS has advantages in the number of satellites, coverage, and positioning performance. This paper focuses on the comprehensive evaluation of BDS by comparing the data quality and positioning performance of BDS and those of Global Positioning System (GPS). The performance evaluation and comparison is based on 7-day observation data collected in April 2020 at three different geographical locations in China. The experimental results show that GPS and BDS have a number of significant differences. The number of visible satellites in BDS is twice that of GPS in China. The SNRs of GPS signals of different frequencies are quite different from each other, while BDS signals of different frequencies have very similar SNR observations. BDS-3 and GPS achieve similar positioning performance in terms of internal positional error, external positional accuracy, coordinate time series and Dilution of Precision (DOP). The mean and STD of the internal positional error of GPS and BDS are less than 3 m, while the external positional accuracy of both systems is better than 5 m. It is also observed that the overall variation in coordinate time series of the three coordinates of BDS is slightly smaller than that of GPS. In addition, the BDS DOP is basically equivalent to the GPS DOP, although occasionally the former is greater than the latter. The results are largely contrary to most of the results associated with performance comparison between BDS and GPS reported in the literature. The main reason would be that the number of visible satellites, observations and DOP of BDS are superior to GPS and single BDS-1, BDS-2 or BDS-3 in China. We believe that the development of BDS is still in progress and BDS is making continuous performance enhancement.