Stochastic Modeling of Smartphones GNSS Observations Using LS-VCE and Application to Samsung S20

In recent years, numerous smartphones have been equipped with global navigation satellite system (GNSS) technology, enabling individuals to utilize their own devices for positioning and navigation purposes. In 2016, with the launch of a mobile app by Google, namely GnssLogger, smartphone users with Android version 7 or higher were able to record raw GNSS measurements (i.e., pseudorange, carrier phase, Doppler, and carrier-to-noise density ratio (C/N0)). Since then, enhancing the accuracy and efficiency of smartphone positioning has become an interesting area of research. Precise point positioning (PPP) is a powerful method providing precise real-time positioning of a single receiver, and it can be applied to smartphone observations as well. Achieving high-precision PPP requires selecting appropriate functional and stochastic models. In this study, we investigate the development of more reliable stochastic models for smartphone GNSS observations. The least-square variance component estimation (LS-VCE) method is applied to double-difference (DD) pseudorange and carrier phase observations from two Samsung S20s to obtain appropriate variances for GPS and GLONASS. According to the results, there is no significant correlation between the pseudorange and carrier phase observations of GPS and GLONASS on the L1 frequency. Furthermore, the quality of GLONASS carrier phase observations is comparable to that of GPS. The model’s performance is then assessed with respect to single-frequency precise point positioning (SF-PPP) using a dataset collected in kinematic mode from a Samsung S20 smartphone. A significant improvement of 25.1% and 32.7% on the root-mean-square (RMS) of horizontal positioning and the 50th percentile error, respectively, was achieved when employing the obtained stochastic model.