Accurate position location in TDS-OFDM based digital television broadcasting networks

Compared with the global positioning system (GPS), the digital television (DTV) broadcasting signal is a promising candidate for position location due to low implementation cost and strong signal reception. Without changing the current infrastructure of the Chinese DTV broadcasting network, this paper proposes a novel positioning scheme using the multi-carrier pseudo-noise (PN-MC) training sequence in the guard interval of the time domain synchronous OFDM (TDS-OFDM) signal frame. Different from the existing positioning methods based on timing synchronization or super resolution algorithms, the joint time-frequency estimation utilizing the properties of the received PN-MC sequence both in the time and frequency domain with respect to transmission delay, results in the accurate time of arrival (TOA) estimation. Performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated by Monte Carlo simulations in comparison with other the-state-of-art methods. The positioning accuracy of less than 0.1 m when the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is greater than 15 dB is achieved, under both the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) and the simulated multi-path channels.