Fusion of TOF and TDOA for 3GPP positioning

Positioning in cellular networks is often based on mobile-assisted measurements of serving and neighboring base stations. Traditionally, positioning is considered to be enabled when the mobile provides measurements of three different base stations. In this paper, we additionally investigate positioning based on time series of Time Of Flight (TOF) and Time Difference of Arrival (TDOA) measurements gathered from two base stations with known positions, where the specific base stations involved depend on the trajectory of the mobile station.. The set of two base stations is different along the trajectory. Each report contains TOF for the serving base station, and one TDOA measurement for the most favorable neighboring base station relative the serving base station. We derive explicit analytical solution related to the intersection of the absolute distance circle (from TOF) and relative distance hyperbola (from TDOA). We consider both geometric noise-free problem and the more realistic problem with additive noise as delivered in the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) Long-Term Evolution (LTE). Positioning performance is evaluated using the Cramér-Rao lower bound.