Grid-Based Geoprocessing for Integrated Global Navigation Satellite System Simulation

Abstract

It is anticipated that the integration of global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) will improve the overall positioning performance benefiting many existing applications and paving the way for the emergence of new location-based or location-aware applications. However, such integrations of GNSSs (iGNSS) will also require the development of a new generation of receivers and methodologies that can utilize the new information efficiently and effectively. This is especially true for real-time applications, such as navigation, for which time performance is of the essence in providing highly accurate positioning solutions. In this paper, we address time performance of iGNSS by focusing only on the visibility parameter, among all parameters, because the visibility solution is a prerequisite for the other parameters, and it is very expensive computationally. We propose an efficient web service for visibility computation, called iGNSS-v and discuss our experimentation with a grid computing platform. The results of the experiment indicate that grids can potentially benefit iGNSS by improving the time performances of its various components, but further optimization is needed in order to address the real-time requirement of iGNSS-QoS prediction.