Mobile Sensing: GPS Location

By César Barreto

The Global Positioning System (GPS) is a location system, designed by the

United States Department of Defense for military purposes to provide accurate
estimates of position, velocity, and time; Operational since 1995, it jointly uses a
computer network and a constellation of 24 satellites to determine, by
triangulation, the altitude, longitude and latitude of any object on the Earth's
surface.

In the civil sphere and citing security reasons, only the use of a degraded
subset of GPS signals is allowed. However, the civil community has found
alternatives to obtain excellent location precision through the so-called
differential techniques. Thanks to them, civil applications have experienced
tremendous growth and there are currently more than 70 manufacturers of GPS
receivers.

Principles of operation of the GPS system

The purpose of the GPS system is to calculate the position of any point in a
space of coordinates (x,y,z), starting from the calculation of the distances of the
point to a minimum of three satellites whose location is known. The distance
between the user (GPS receiver) and a satellite is measured by multiplying the
flight time of the signal emitted from the satellite by its propagation speed. To
measure the time of flight of the radio signal, it is necessary that the clocks of
the satellites and the receivers are synchronized, since they must
simultaneously generate the same code. However, while the clocks of the
satellites are very precise, those of the receivers are low-cost quartz oscillators
and therefore imprecise. Distances with errors due to synchronism are called
pseudoranges. The deviation in the clocks of the receivers adds another
unknown that requires a minimum of four satellites to correctly estimate the
positions.

In the calculation of the pseudoranges it is taken into account that the GPS
signals are very weak and are immersed in the background noise inherent to
the planet in the radio band. This natural noise is made up of a series of random
pulses, which leads to the generation of an artificial pseudo-random code by
GPS receivers as a pattern of fluctuations. At each instant a satellite transmits a
signal with the same pattern as the pseudo-random series generated by the
receiver. Based on this synchronization, the receiver calculates the distance by
moving its pseudo-random code in time until it coincides with the received code;
this displacement corresponds to the time of flight of the signal. This process is
carried out automatically, continuously and instantly in each receiver. The use
of these pseudo-random codes allows access control to the satellite system, so
that in conflicting situations the code could be changed, forcing all satellites to
use a single frequency band without interference, since each satellite has a
code Own GPS. Although the speed of the satellites is high (4 km/s), their
instantaneous position can be estimated with an error of less than several
meters based on a prediction of previous positions in a period of 24 to 48 hours.
The ground stations periodically review the atomic clocks of the satellites, two of
cesium and two of rubidium, sending the ephemeris 1 and the corrections of the
clocks, since the precision of the clocks and the stability of the trajectory of the
satellites are key in the operation of the GPS system.

Sources of error in GPS

The sources of error that currently significantly affect the measurements are
described below.made with GPS:

• Ionospheric disturbance. The ionosphere is made up of a layer of electrically

charged particles. that modify the speed of the radio signals that pass through
it.
• Meteorological phenomena. In the troposphere, the cradle of meteorological
phenomena, water vapor affects electromagnetic signals by slowing them down.
The errors generated are similar in magnitude to those caused by the
ionosphere, but its correction is practically impossible.
• Imprecision in clocks. The atomic clocks of the satellites show slight
deviations despite their careful adjustment and control; the same is true of
receiver clocks.
• Unforeseen electrical interference. Electrical interference can cause
erroneous correlations from pseudo-random codes or improper rounding in the
calculation of an orbit. if the error is big it is easy to detect, but this is not the
case when the deviations are small and cause mismatches. up to one meter
• Multipath error. Signals transmitted from satellites may suffer reflections
before reaching the receiver. Modern receivers employ advanced signal
processing techniques and antenna design to minimize this error, which is very
difficult to model as it depends on the environment where
GPS antenna is located.
• Interference "Selective Availability S/A". It constitutes the greatest source
of error and is introduced deliberately by the military.
• Receiver-satellite topology. Receivers should consider receiver geometry-
visible satellites used in the calculation of distances, since a certain spatial
configuration can increase or decrease the precision of the measurements. The
most advanced receivers use a multiplicative factor that modifies the distance
measurement error (geometric precision dilution).

Error sources can be grouped according to whether or not they depend on the
geometry of the satellites. The error due to the Selective Availability and the
derivatives of the imprecision of the clocks are independent of the geometry of
satellites, while ionospheric and tropospheric delays and multipath errors are
strongly dependent on of the topology. The errors coming from the different
sources are accumulated in an uncertainty value that goes associated with each
GPS position measurement.

GPS applications

There are multiple fields of application of positioning systems, both as

navigation aid systems, as in atmospheric and terrestrial space modeling or
applications with high precision requirements in time measurement. Some of
the civil fields where GPS systems are currently used are detailed below:

• Study of atmospheric phenomena. When the GPS signal crosses the

troposphere, water vapor, the main cause of the different meteorological
phenomena, modifies its speed of propagation. The subsequent analysis of the
GPS signal is very useful in the development of weather prediction models.
• Location and navigation in inhospitable regions. The GPS system is used as
an aid in research expeditions in regions of difficult access and in scenarios
characterized by the absence of marks or obstacles. An example is GPS-guided
systems to deepen knowledge of polar or desert regions.
• Geological and topographic models. Geologists began to apply the GPS
system in the 1980s to study the slow and steady movement of tectonic plates,
for earthquake prediction in geologically active regions. In topography, the GPS
system constitutes a basic and fundamental tool to carry out land surveys and
forest and agricultural inventories.
• Civil Engineering. In this field, the high precision of the GPS system is used to
monitor in real time the deformations of large metallic or concrete structures
subjected to loads.
• Automatic alarm systems. There are alarm systems connected to sensors
equipped with a GPS receiver to monitor the transport of both high-risk polluting
and perishable goods (fresh and frozen food products). In this case, the
generation of an alarm allows rapid assistance to the vehicle.
• Synchronization of signals. The electrical industry uses GPS to synchronize
the clocks of its monitoring stations in order to locate possible failures in the
electrical service. The location of the origin of the failure is done by
triangulation, knowing the time of occurrence from three stations with
synchronized clocks.
• Guidance for the physically handicapped. GPS systems are being developed
to help blind people navigate through the city. Along the same lines, the tourism
industry is studying the incorporation of the location system in the guidance of
tourist visits in order to optimize the routes between the different places on a
route.
• Navigation and control of vehicle fleets. The GPS system is used in trajectory
planning and vehicle fleet control. The police, emergency services (firefighters,
ambulances), taxi stations, courier services, delivery companies, etc. they
organize their tasks optimizing the routes of the fleets from a central station.
Some railway companies already use the GPS system to locate their trains,
locomotives or wagons, supervising compliance with the signals.
• Civil aviation systems. In 1983, the downing of flight 007 of the Korean airline
when invading the Soviet sky, due to navigation problems, accentuated the
need to have the help of a precise location system in air navigation. Today the
GPS system is used in civil aviation both in domestic and transoceanic flights,
as well as in the landing operation. The importance of the use of GPS in this
field has promoted, as will be seen in the next section, the development in
Europe, the United States and Japan of systems aimed at improving GPS
accuracy.
• Unassisted vehicle navigation. DGPS systems are being incorporated to help
ships to maneuver precisely in areas of intense traffic, in autonomous land
vehicles that carry out their activity in open environments in repetitive tasks,
surveillance in hostile environments (fire, grenades, pollution of any kind). and
in all those mobiles that carry out cargo transport, both in agriculture and in
mining or construction. The high precision of the measurements has allowed
important advances in space in low orbits and thus high-risk tasks of inspection,
maintenance and assembly of artificial satellites can now be carried out by
autonomous robots.

The future of GPS

In 1996, the regulations governing GPS systems determined the suppression, in

2006, of Selective Availability and the incorporation of one more frequency for
civil use. This means that within a few years the GPS satellites will transmit civil
code on the L2 and L1 frequencies, a redundancy that will allow estimation of
ionospheric errors, providing an absolute mode precision similar to that
obtained with differential techniques. The signal on the L1 frequency will remain
unchanged, which will allow the current receivers to continue operating. The
control segment will be improved with the start-up of a new control system,
currently in the design phase, for the expert station that includes up to a total of
twenty monitoring stations, which will mean more precise control of the
ephemeris and of satellite clocks. With current GPS, GLONASS,
GPS/GLONASS navigation systems it is not possible to meet the rigorous
safety standards that some civil applications, such as air navigation, require.

Specifically, the notification of errors to the user regarding the operation of the
system can take from one second, when the error occurs in the satellite, to
several hours, in those cases in which it is the control segment that detects the
failure. In order to solve these drawbacks, Europe is developing EGNOS
(European Geostationary Navigation Overlay Service which will be operational
in 2003. This system will reduce positioning errors to meet air navigation safety
standards with the installation on land of a network of 34 fixed receiving
antennas (RIMS) that will receive the GPS signals, sending them to a control
center where the satellite information will be calibrated, measuring the possible
error to correct it and sending it again to 10 ground stations. In addition, these
signals will be sent to two new geostationary INMARSAT satellites located at an
altitude of 35,000km, which will act as repeaters sending the signals to the
users. Similar services are being developed in the United States (WAAS: Wide
Area Augmentation System) and in Japan (MTSAS: MTSAT Satellite Based
Augmentation System). Likewise, Europe will launch a global navigation
satellite system (GNSS-1: Global Navigation Satellite System 1) that will
integrate the services of GPS, GLONASS and the EGNOS, WAAS and MTSAS
networks. This will be the initial step towards achieving a European positioning
system (GNSS-2 or Galileo) that will use a constellation of European satellites.
Finally, point out that in the next five years GPS and GPS/GLONASS will be the
only positioning systems based on satellites that will be operational.

Conclusion

Today crowd sensing is optimized to calculate a location quickly, even from

initial rough guesses about position and time. GPS receivers consume much
more power, however there is hardware that indicates the operation of a button-
type battery that records a signal sample of one millisecond every hour for two
years, this given that the receiver does not require precision or time noise and
the PCB footprint can reduce the use of large and heavy receivers for timing
sound. For smartphone-connected devices, all computing can be done in the
cloud that frees the mobile device from computing.