A Study on Accuracy Improvement of SBAS Ionospheric Correction Using Electron Density Distribution Model

Abstract

This paper proposed a method to estimate the vertical delay from the slant delay, which can improve accuracy of the ionospheric correction of SBAS. Proposed method used Chapman profile which is a model for the vertical electron density distribution of the ionosphere. In the proposed method, we assumed that parameters of Chapman profile are given and the vertical ionospheric can be modeled with linear function. We also divided ionosphere into multi-layer. For the verification, we converted slant ionospheric delays to vertical ionospheric delays by using the proposed method and generated the ionospheric correction of SBAS with vertical delays. We used International Reference Ionosphere (IRI) model for the simulation to verification. As a result, the accuracy of ionospheric correction from proposed method has been improved for 17.3% in daytime, 10.2% in evening, 2.1% in nighttime, compared with correction from thin shell model. Finally, we verified the method in the SBAS user domain, by comparing slant ionospheric delays of users. Using the proposed method, root mean square value of slant delay error decreased for 23.6% and max error value decreased for 27.2%.