The interior-point method for an optimal treatment of bias in trilateration location

This paper presents a new position-determination estimator for trilateration location. The proposed estimator takes the measurement bias into consideration and improves the location accuracy of a mobile location system. In case that a mobile station (MS) utilizes signals from a set of base stations for its location, the computed location is largely affected by nonline-of-sight (NLOS) error in signal propagation. A constrained optimization method in a three-stage estimation structure is proposed to estimate and eliminate the measurement bias contained in each pseudorange and mainly caused by the NLOS error. A linear observation model of the bias is formulated, and the interior-point optimization technique optimally estimates the bias by introducing a feasible range of the measurement bias. It is demonstrated that the new three-stage estimator successfully computes an accurate location of an MS in a realistic environment setting. The location accuracy of the proposed estimator is analyzed and compared with the existing methods through mathematical formulations and simulations. The proposed estimator efficiently mitigates the effect of a measurement bias and shows that the iterated least square (ILS) accuracy of 118 m [67% distance root-mean-square (DRMS)] can be improved to about 17 m in a typical urban environment