Mobile station location based on hybrid of signal strength and time of arrival

Abstract

Positioning of users or mobile station (MS) in cellular systems becomes an interesting topic since the related number of applications for the location information is growing rapidly. The decision to make the locating of mobile phones under the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) mandatory is one of the driving forces to research and provide solutions to it. Deploying such applications would require a proper method for positioning the MS that are simple and accurate especially in urban area. There are many research papers addressing this issue based on timing method that calculate the timing delay for signal sent from MS to base station (BS) or vise versa, and other method based on signal strength. In this paper, we present a new calculation method to locate the mobile phone in urban district. This technique is based on hybrid method that uses signal strength to estimate the timing delay and comparing it with the measured time of arrival of the signal. The minimum timing value of the two results would be accepted and averaged for n samples. This will improve the accuracy and reduce the effect of multi-path signaling that both timing signaling and signal strength methods suffer from. In addition, a new calculation method has been presented to find the location of MS based on the BSs coordinates.