A low-cost, high-speed algorithm for mobile positioning

ABSTRACT: Location determination in cellular networks is one of the most important features of current 3rd generation (3G) wireless communication systems and is important criteria in Federal Communications Commission (FCC) ruling regarding the wireless emergency calling system (E911) in United States. This technology empowers many location based services namely Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) and electronic warfare positioning. Using the received signal strength measurement, several methods can be applied to estimate the cellular mobile station position. As an example, Angle of Arrival (AOA) and Time of Arrival (TOA) can be named. To estimate the MS location using these methods two smart antennas need to be implemented, although using more than two antennas lead to higher accuracy and the estimated location will be more precise. The used estimation methods so far, are trigonometric equation based methods, which are software based and sophisticated to be implemented in location determination aims. In this thesis, we presented a low-cost, high speed hybrid TOA/AOA method that combines TOA and AOA methods and use the both method’s advantages. In traditional hybrid AOA/TOA method which is software-oriented, trigonometric equations are used that makes the total computational cost to be increased, hence, is improper to be implemented in hardware. In our proposed method, we used simple add, subtract and shift operations that makes this method proper to be implemented in hardware e.g. FPGA. The comparison between the Traditional software-oriented hybrid AOA/TOA and our proposed method will be carried out in the chapters. For these methods analysis and simulation, we used Matlab 7 package. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed algorithm outperforms the AOA, TOA and software-oriented hybrid AOA/TOA methods in terms of total computation cost, derived accuracy and implementation simplicity. Keywords: Wireless routing, Signal processing, TOA, TOA, Hybrid positioning, Localization. …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………