Impact of one satellite outage on ARAIM depleted constellation configurations

Advanced Receiver Autonomous Integrity Monitoring (ARAIM) is a new technology that will provide worldwide coverage of vertical guidance in aviation navigation. The ARAIM performance and improvement under depleted constellations is a practical problem that needs to be faced and researched further. It is a shortcut that improves the availability in position domain whose key idea is to replace the conventional least squares process with a non-least-squares estimator to lower the integrity risk in exchange for a slight increase in nominal position error. The contributions given in this paper include two parts: First, the impacts of one satellite outage on different constellations are analyzed and compared. The conclusion is that GPS is more sensitive and vulnerable to one satellite outage. Second, a constellation weighted ARAIM (CW-ARAIM) position estimator is proposed. The position solution is replaced by a constellation weighted average solution to eliminate the constellation difference. The new solution will move close to the constellation solutions with respect to the accuracy requirement. The simulation results under baseline GPS and Galileo dual-constellation show that the one GPS satellite outage will knock the availability from 91% to only 50%. The performance remains stable with one Galileo satellite outage. With the assistance of the CW-ARAIM method, the availability can increase from 50% to more than 80% under depleted GPS configurations. Even without any satellite outage, the proposed method can effectively improve the availability from 91.29% to 98.75%. The test results under optimistic constellations further verify that a balanced constellation is more important than more satellites on orbit and the superiority of CW-ARAIM method is still effective. (C) 2019 Chinese Society of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Production and hosting by Elsevier Ltd.