Progress of BeiDou time transfer at NTSC

Abstract Time transfer using global navigation satellite system (GNSS) is a primary method of remote atomic clock comparisons. As of today, there are four operational GNSS systems, namely GPS, GLONASS, Galileo and BeiDou Navigation Satellite System (BDS or BeiDou). All of them can continuously provide position, navigation and time services. This paper mainly focuses on the progress of BeiDou time transfer at the National Time Service Center, Chinese Academy of Sciences (NTSC). In order to realize the BeiDou common view (CV) time comparison, we developed the Rinex2CGGTTS software according to the guidelines of the Common GNSS Generic Time Transfer Standard, Version 2E (CGGTTS V2E). By comparing the solutions of the Rinex2CGGTTS software to the solutions of the sbf2cggtts software provided by the manufacturer of our multi-GNSS receiver, we found the sbf2cggtts (version 1.0.5) solutions contained biases in measurements to different BeiDou satellites. The biases are most likely caused by sbf2cggtts’ timing group delay corrections in data processing. The noise of the observation data is analyzed by code multipath and common clock difference. Finally, the BeiDou CV results are compared to the GPS/GLONASS/Galileo CV results between NTSC and three European UTC(k) laboratories, including Royal Observatory of Belgium (ORB), Real Institute y Observatory de la Armada (ROA), Research Institutes of Sweden (RISE or SP). For the comparisons of each baseline, we aligned the BeiDou/Galileo/GLONASS links to the calibrated GPS link with the double-difference method. The results show that the performance of BeiDou CV is correlated to the number of BeiDou satellites available in common view. With the current BeiDou constellation, the standard deviation of the differences between all BeiDou CV satellites averaging result and the GPS PPP result is 2.03 ns, 2.90 ns and 4.06 ns for ORB-NTSC, SP-NTSC and ROA-NTSC links respectively.