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A Constrained Least Squares Approach to Mobile Positioning: Algorithms and Optimality

Abstract

The problem of locating a mobile terminal has received significant attention in the field of wireless communications. Time-of-arrival (TOA), received signal strength (RSS), time-difference-of-arrival (TDOA), and angle-of-arrival (AOA) are commonly used measurements for estimating the position of the mobile station. In this paper, we present a constrained weighted least squares (CWLS) mobile positioning approach that encompasses all the above described measurement cases. The advantages of CWLS include performance optimality and capability of extension to hybrid measurement cases (e.g., mobile positioning using TDOA and AOA measurements jointly). Assuming zero-mean uncorrelated measurement errors, we show by mean and variance analysis that all the developed CWLS location estimators achieve zero bias and the Cramér-Rao lower bound approximately when measurement error variances are small. The asymptotic optimum performance is also confirmed by simulation results.

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Correspondence to KW Cheung.

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Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 International License ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0 ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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Cheung, K., So, H., Ma, WK. et al. A Constrained Least Squares Approach to Mobile Positioning: Algorithms and Optimality. EURASIP J. Adv. Signal Process. 2006, 020858 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1155/ASP/2006/20858

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1155/ASP/2006/20858

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