Real-time Precise Point Positioning with a Xiaomi MI 8 Android Smartphone

The Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) positioning technology using smartphones can be applied to many aspects of mass life, and the world’s first dual-frequency GNSS smartphone Xiaomi MI 8 represents a new trend in the development of GNSS positioning technology with mobile phones. The main purpose of this work is to explore the best real-time positioning performance that can be achieved on a smartphone without reference stations. By analyzing the GNSS raw measurements, it is found that all the three mobile phones tested have the phenomenon that the differences between pseudorange observations and carrier phase observations are not fixed, thus a PPP (precise point positioning) method is modified accordingly. Using a Xiaomi MI 8 smartphone, the modified real-time PPP positioning strategy which estimates two clock biases of smartphone was applied. The results show that using multi-GNSS systems data can effectively improve positioning performance; the average horizontal and vertical RMS positioning error are 0.81 and 1.65 m respectively (using GPS, BDS, and Galileo data); and the time required for each time period positioning errors in N and E directions to be under 1 m is less than 30s.