GNSS RUMS: GNSS Realistic Urban Multiagent Simulator for Collaborative Positioning Research

Accurate localization of road agents (GNSS receivers) is the basis of intelligent transportation systems, which is still difficult to achieve for GNSS positioning in urban areas due to the signal interferences from buildings. Various collaborative positioning techniques were recently developed to improve the positioning performance by the aid from neighboring agents. However, it is still challenging to study their performances comprehensively. The GNSS measurement error behavior is complicated in urban areas and unable to be represented by naive models. On the other hand, real experiments requiring numbers of devices are difficult to conduct, especially for a large-scale test. Therefore, a GNSS realistic urban measurement simulator is developed to provide measurements for collaborative positioning studies. The proposed simulator employs a ray-tracing technique searching for all possible interferences in the urban area. Then, it categorizes them into direct, reflected, diffracted, and multipath signal to simulate the pseudorange, C/N0, and Doppler shift measurements correspondingly. The performance of the proposed simulator is validated through real experimental comparisons with different scenarios based on commercial-grade receivers. The proposed simulator is also applied with different positioning algorithms, which verifies it is sophisticated enough for the collaborative positioning studies in the urban area.

Keywords: global navigation satellite system (GNSS); simulator; collaborative positioning; multipath; 3D building model; urban canyon

Recommended citation: Zhang, G., Xu, B., Ng, H.-F., & Hsu, L.-T. (2021). GNSS RUMS: GNSS Realistic Urban Multiagent Simulator for Collaborative Positioning Research. Remote Sensing, 13(4). https://doi.org/10.3390/rs13040544.