An analysis of TOA-based location for IS-95 mobiles

Abstract

This paper uses field measurements to characterize the performance of a time-of-arrival (TOA) based CDMA mobile location system. The measurements are used to determine the ranging error experienced by a TOA detector due to the multipath radio channel. The performance of a simple threshold detector and an enhanced least-squares detector is investigated. The relationship between ranging error and position error is illustrated using a dilution of precision calculation. Ranging error is also combined with the probability of false threshold detection to determine the signal to noise ratio required at the correlator output.