GPSIM: A Personal Computer-Based GPS Simulator System

Abstract

Global Positioning Systems (GPS) are now in use in many applications, ranging from GIS to route guidance, automatic vehicle location (AVL), air, land, and marine navigation, and many other transportation and geographical based applications. In many applications, the GPS receiver is connected to some form of intelligent electronic system which receives the positional data from the GPS unit and then performs the required operation. When developing and testing GPS-based systems, one of the problems is that it is usually necessary to create GPS-compatible geographical data to simulate a GPS operation in real time. This paper provides the details of a Personal Computer (PC)-based GPS simulator system called GPSIM. The system receives user way-points and routes from Windows-based screen forms and then simulates a GPS operation in real time by generating most of the commonly used GPS sentences. The user-specified waypoints are divided into a number of small segments, each segment specifying a small distance in the direction of the original waypoint. The GPS sentence corresponding to the geographical coordinates of each segment is then sent out of the PC serial port. The system described is an invaluable testing tool for GPS-based system developers and also for people training to learn to use GPS-based products.