Performance of a handset-assisted positioning method for GSM

This paper illustrates the performance of a mobile positioning technique applicable to a GSM network. The technique relies on the time-of-arrival estimation of some known signals. An improved version of a standard estimator is proposed in order to mitigate the effect of multipath propagation, and its performance is illustrated through simulations in various environments. A mobile station monitoring the broadcast carrier of several base stations uses this algorithm to estimate the pseudo-ranges between itself and the transmitters. These measurements are then fed to a fixing algorithm to deliver an estimate of the mobile position. The performance of the positioning method is assessed in some typical urban, suburban and rural environments. It shows promising results for the deployment of location-based applications.