Receiver Autonomous Integrity Monitoring (RAIM)

Receiver autonomous integrity monitoring (RAIM) is a technology developed to assess the integrity of GPS signals in a GPS receiver system. It is of special importance in safety-critical GPS applications, such as in aviation or marine navigation.

RAIM detects faults with redundant GPS pseudorange measurements. That is, when more satellites are available than needed to produce a position fix, the extra pseudoranges should all be consistent with the computed position. A pseudorange that differs significantly from the expected value (i.e., an outlier) may indicate a fault of the associated satellite or another signal integrity problem (e.g., ionospheric dispersion).

For more information, see the RAIM Wikipedia article.

Stanford’s research in this area started in the mid 1990’s funded by the FAA.