TOA Extraction in Multipath Fading Channels for Location Estimation

In this paper we present and evaluate a low cost simple method for accurate time of arrival (TOA) estimation in multipath fading channels for positioning purposes. It is well known that TOA estimations are biased in multipath propagation and non-line-of-sight (NLOS) conditions. These biases will result in poor position estimations in wireless networks. Recently super-resolution methods have been widely used for high resolution TOA estimations. Although these methods result in accurate TOA estimates, but they need strong processors that in many cases makes them impractical. Here, using time domain properties of the estimated channel delay profile, we introduce a simple method to reduce the TOA estimation errors due to the multipath fading channels. In order to evaluate the proposed method, we simulate a UMTS network based on 3GPP standards. The positioning error using the proposed method will be compared with the ones obtained by MUSIC algorithm which is a famous and accurate super-resolution method. Simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed method