Effects of system and environment parameters on the performance of network-based mobile station position estimators

This paper provides an asymptotic performance evaluation of network-based or multilateral positioning systems, where the times and/or angles of arrival of the signals traveling from a mobile station (MS) to a set of fixed stations (FSs) are used to estimate the MS's position. The effects of the various system-design parameters as well as the effects of biased bearing and time measurements are analyzed, and explicit formulas are derived. Biased measurements can result, for example, from hardware calibration errors or multipath effects, including the lack of line of sight (LoS). Among other results, it is shown that only a few system and cellular parameters can be used to minimize their nuisance effects. The mathematical analysis is based on the Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB) and the maximum likelihood theory. It is completed with numerical simulations and a discussion of the positioning performance for two important second-generation cellular systems, GSM and IS-95.