Multipath assisted positioning in vehicular applications

Precise localization and tracking in intelligent transportation systems has aroused great interest since it is required in a large variety of applications. The positioning accuracy of global navigation satellite systems is unreliable and insufficient enough for many use cases. In urban canyons or tunnels, the positioning performance degrades due to a low received signal power, multipath propagation, or signal blocking. Instead we exploit the ubiquitous access to cellular mobile radio networks. Cellular networks are designed to cover the access to the network in an area by a single link to reduce the risk of interference from neighboring base stations. The idea of Channel-SLAM is to exploit the numerous multipath components (MPCs) of a radio signal arriving at the receiver for positioning. Each MPC can be regarded as being sent from a virtual transmitter in a pure line-of-sight condition. Within this paper, we show how to apply multipath assisted positioning in an urban scenario. Therefore, we analyze how a road user equipped with a circular antenna array is tracked in an urban scenario in the presence of only one physical transmitter. We further jointly estimate the positions of the physical and the virtual transmitters to enrich maps.