Simultaneous position and reflector estimation (SPRE) by single base-station

Accurately estimating user's location is an important functionality in mobile communications. In this paper, we propose SPRE algorithm that can simultaneously estimate the positions of both user and reflectors with single base-station (BS). Different from previous work, the BS knows nothing about the surrounding environment and the motion model of the user. All BS knows is the measured time-of-arrivals (TOAs) and angle-of-arrivals (AOAs) of multiple paths. Since signals from different propagation paths are received by the same receiver, the TOA differences between the direct path and the reflection paths have nearly no errors, which provides SPRE with high-accuracy information. The SPRE takes an iterative procedure to estimate the user's location and reflectors' locations. Simulation results show that reflectors can be accurately estimated after couples of iterations, and in return they improve the estimation accuracy of user position. The proposed SPRE method can localize a mobile user with sub-meter accuracy in indoor cases and meter accuracy in outdoor cases. If the locations of reflectors are known a priori, the SPRE method can realize centimeter-level accuracy of positioning.