Effects of channel environment on timing advance for mobile device positioning in long-term evolution networks

As part of the synchronization process between a tower and a cell phone in an LTE network, a timing advance (TA) that forces the cell phone to advance the transmission of its signal based upon the signal propagation time between the cell phone and the tower is calculated. The correlation between TA value and distance allows for a potential location scheme to be implemented. We present an improved model of the probability density function for the error associated with TA-based positioning. Additionally, we characterize the variance of TA in multiple channel environments to estimate accuracy of a TA-based positioning system.