MOSAIC/DME system is designed for Alternative Positioning, Navigation and Timing (APNT). The purpose of APNT is the prevention of navigation degraded situations when Global Navigation Satellite Services (GNSS) are unavailable, particularly for aviation users to provide the continuity and safety of air services. MOSAIC/DME is composed of a DME station and multiple pseudolite antennas (MOSAIC antennas) which are time-synchronized. And these two types of signals provide the 3-dimensional positioning using only a single station. Instinctively, more transmit antennas makes better positioning accuracy and faster cycle ambiguity resolution which should be considered for the carrier phase measurements. But the large number of antennas causes the complexity of system and difficulty for the implementation. Hence the proper number of antennas should be considered to provide the required performance efficiently. This study analyzes the effect of the number of MOSAIC antennas, particularly in positioning accuracy and its cycle ambiguity problems. The positioning accuracy of this system is analyzed using Monte-Carlo simulations with proper error models, and the ambiguity performance is studied using simulations with LSAST.

Keywords: APNT, Mosaic, DME, pseudolite