The Prediction of Geocentric Corrections during Communication Link Outages in PPP

The International GNSS Service (IGS) real-time service (RTS) provides access to real-time precise products. State-Space Representation (SSR) products are disseminated through the Internet using the Networked Transport of the RTCM (Radio Technical Commission for Maritime Services) via the Internet Protocol (NTRIP). However, communication outages caused by a loss of the communication link during ephemeris changes can occur. Unfortunately, any break in providing orbit and clock corrections affects the possibility to perform precise point positioning. To eliminate this problem, various methods have been developed and presented in the literature. The solution proposed by the authors is to directly predict geocentric corrections. This manuscript presents the results and analysis of geocentric correction predictions under two scenarios: the first between the IODE (issue of data ephemeris) value change and the second where prediction must be done for epochs containing a change in IODE ephemeris. In this case, the prediction uses data from a previous message. The Root Mean Square (RMS) values calculated based on the differences between the true correction values and the predicted geocentric corrections using a linear function, a second-degree polynomial and a constant value do not differ significantly. The numerical results show that, in most cases, maintaining the constant value of the last registered SSR correction is the best option.