A Study on the Reliability of the Ionospheric VTEC and Satellite DCB Derived from a Regional GPS Network

According to the requirement of high-precision satellite navigation, we have introduced the method for the quasi-realtime monitoring of variations of the regional ionospheric total electron content (TEC) and GPS satellite differential code bias (DCB), based on the dual-frequency carrier-phase smoothed pseudorange data obtained from a regional GPS network in China. Especially, we have studied the feasibility of retrieving DCB independently from the regional GPS networks with different sizes. For this purpose, 3 regional networks based on the countrywide GPS stations are investigated. The comparisons of the computed DCB and VTEC(vertical total electron content) with those of CODE(the Center for Orbit Determination in Europe) indicate that in order to realize a reliable quasi-realtime measurement of DCB by a regional network, there is a certain requirement on the size of the regional network, and that the relative accuracies of the quasi-realtime VTEC and DCB measured by using a Chinese GPS regional network can reach 2.0TECu and 0.25 ns, respectively.