Mobile Station Location Estimation for MIMO Communication Systems

Wireless location is the procedure that determines the position of the mobile station in a wireless network. The traditional mobile location systems such as direction finding and ranging are based on trilateration/multilateration techniques. In wireless MIMO communication systems which utilize antenna array at both transmit and receive sides, the redundancy of multipath signals can be exploited to extract more parameters such as angle-of-arrival, angle-of-departure and delay-of-arrival using advanced array signal processing techniques. In this paper, based on estimated multipath signal parameters in the context of MIMO communication systems, we propose a novel approach to determine the position of mobile stations using only one base station. This approach minimizes the errors occurring from the estimation of multipath parameters and gives an optimal estimation of the position of the mobile station by simultaneously resolving a set of algebraic location equations. The mean-square errors are measured and compared with the Cramer-Rao lower bound to demonstrate the performance of the proposed method. This solution breaks the bottleneck of conventional mobile positioning systems which have to require multi-lateration of at least three BSs.