Nowadays, many people and organizations depend on Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS. Monitoring of GNSS is important to ensure the quality of GNSS measurements and products. The availability of the signals-in-space (SiS) is an essential part of the monitoring of GNSS, but it is not clear how availability is defined and standards for monitoring are lacking. The main research question for this thesis is therefore: Which are the key performance indicators related to availability that unambiguously describe sensor station and system performance in time, how can these be computed in an operational manner, and how can they be presented in a condensed form to the stakeholders? This includes an objective of defining unambiguous performance parameters for sensor station and system, and address the considerations related to the definition. A prototype software tool is created to study the algorithms and compute the key performance indicators.

Availability is in the basis a binary operation: a signal is available or unavailable. When this is applied on daily measurements, daily statistics can be computed. A signal is considered available if the code, carrier phase and C/N0 measurements are present, and meet certain standards. A signal is said to be expected if the satellite is expected to transmit that signal, the receiver is configured to receive that signal, and the signal is not blocked by objects in the signal’s path to the sensor station. For this it’s needed to define and compute an elevation mask for each station.

The sensor station and system performance parameters are computed from a network of sensor stations, using files in the Receiver Independent Exchange format (RINEX). Four key performance indicators are defined for the sensor station performance. The Daily Station Availability describes the part of the day that the station is operational, the Daily Station Total Availability gives how well the station receives, and the Effective Mean Elevation quantifies the elevation mask and thus the location of the sensor station. These three parameters are summarized into the Overall Station Quality parameter, which gives and overall performance class to the sensor station.

For the system performance a satellite is considered available if all signals are received by a sensor station of the monitoring network and the health status is healthy. The satellite is considered unavailable if the signals are received by none of the monitoring stations, while expected by at least two stations, or the health status is unhealthy. The Daily GNSS Availability parameter gives the percentage of the day that the satellite was available and the Daily Available number of Satellites tells how many satellites were available during the day. 

The parameters are computed for a period of 100 days. Results are presented using color codes and by showing only detailed information in case of anomalies or specific investigations. The proposed key performance indicators showed to be very useful at pointing out good performances or anomalies. While SiS availability gives much insight in the performance, a monitoring tool can be improved when combined with other performance aspects.