Position domain filtering and range domain filtering for carrier-smoothed-code DGNSS: an analytical comparison

Carrier-smoothed-code filters for differential Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) positioning can be partitioned into two groups: position domain filters and range domain filters. In carrier-smoothed-code filtering, noise terms of incremental carrier phase act as equivalent propagation noise. The equivalent propagation noises in carrier-smoothed-code filtering are temporally correlated and bounded in time, unlike white Gaussian noises in Kalman filtering. Thus, it seems that carrier-smoothed-code filtering does not inherit all the characteristics of classical Kalman filtering. To demonstrate that position domain filtering is better than range domain filtering a rigorous analysis is performed.