Design of an aircraft landing system using dual-frequency GNSS

There is a strong demand for new all-weather navigation aids to support aircraft precision approach and landing. The Federal Aviation Administration's Local Area Augmentation System (LAAS) is one such navigation aid that uses the Global Positioning System (GPS) to estimate aircraft location. LAAS is required to provide very high levels of accuracy, integrity, continuity, and availability, and the integrity requirement of one undetected navigation failure in a billion approaches has been a critical challenge in the design of this system. Tremendous efforts have developed methods to guarantee integrity for various potential anomalies that might threaten LAAS-aided landing. Currently, almost all these risks are mitigated by existing methods. One issue that remains is the risk due to ionosphere anomalies.; This dissertation introduces novel integrity algorithms for ionosphere anomalies that take advantage of GPS modernization---undergoing changes in the GPS system that enhance civil user capabilities. This modernization includes adding new GPS civil signals, and these signals make possible multiple-frequency techniques. This research focuses on two types of dual-frequency carrier-smoothing methods---Divergence-Free Smoothing and Ionosphere-Free Smoothing---and develops integrity algorithms for ionosphere anomalies using these methods.; Simulations show that the first algorithm, using Ionosphere-Free Smoothing, can achieve 96% to 99.9% availability at best over a broad region of the Conterminous United States (CONUS). This level of availability is unacceptably low for practical use. However, a benefit is that the resulting availability is not a function of the ionosphere condition. The second algorithm, based on Divergence-Free Smoothing, is shown by simulations to achieve more than 99.9% availability over more than 70% of CONUS under nominal ionosphere conditions. However, it has the potential to completely lose availability under severe ionosphere conditions. Taking advantage of these two algorithms, this research introduces a system architecture that implements both smoothing methods. The resulting system switches smoothing methods based upon the best estimate of the current ionosphere state obtained by an ionosphere monitor that is also designed as part of this research. This architecture can achieve more than 99.9% availability under nominal ionosphere conditions and more than 96% availability under severe conditions while meeting all integrity requirements.