A New Approach for Cellular Wireless Location In NLOS Situations

The non-line-of-sight (NLOS) propagation caused by intermittently blocking of the direct path between the base station and the mobile station is the main difficulty for mobile user location in cellular wireless communication system. So it is indispensable to investigate the techniques about the NLOS error identification and correction. In this paper, we suggest a robust and accurate approach using probability density function (PDF) estimator to identify the NLOS situation, and then an improved biased Kalman filter which depends on PDF estimator as the nonlinearity weighting coefficient in recursive operation is used to mitigate the NLOS error for time of arrival (TOA) measurements. As the PDF estimator is calculated from actual TOA samples, it is adaptive for the complex practical NLOS environments. The simulation results also indicate that with the less prior information about communication environments, the approach we present has a good location performance even in severe NLOS situations.