Benefits of BDS-3 B1C/B1I/B2a triple-frequency signals on precise positioning and ambiguity resolution

BDS-3 currently has 28 operational satellites in orbit, of which 27 IGSO/MEO satellites provide open services on five frequencies simultaneously. In particular, the linear combinations of the BDS-3 B1C/B1I/B2a signals have significant benefits in reducing the influence of ionospheric delay error as well as improving ambiguity estimation and positioning accuracy. The presented optimal ionosphere-free combination (242, 218, − 345) and ionosphere-reduced combination (2, 2, − 3) can improve the measurement accuracy by about 20% compared to the BDS-3 B1C/B2a or GPS L1/L5 dual-frequency combination. The ionosphere-reduced combination (2, 2, − 3) with a wavelength of 10.9 cm is almost immune to the ionospheric delay error and has a smaller noise amplification factor compared to the existing dual-frequency combinations. Therefore, its combined ambiguities can be fixed directly even in the case of a long baseline, which can simplify the traditional precise positioning process based on the ionosphere-free combination. The numerical results of BDS-3 real data show that the triple-frequency ionosphere-free or ionosphere-reduced combinations can improve the single-point positioning accuracy by 16–20% and the phase differential positioning accuracy by 7–9%, respectively. The ambiguity resolution of the ionosphere-reduced combination (2, 2, − 3) is achieved with a fixing rate of 88.4% over long baseline up to 1600 km. The presented ionosphere-free and ionosphere-reduced combinations are also very promising to be applied in current PPP applications to simplify the ambiguity fixing process as well as improve positioning accuracy and shorten convergence time.