Estimation and tracking of LTE signals time of arrival in a mobile multipath environment

This paper proposes an algorithm for the estimation and tracking of the direct path (DP) time of arrival (TOA) of the signals received from 4G long term evolution (LTE) cellular base stations (BSs) in a mobile multipath environment. This is important for TOA-based ranging measurements, which may be exploited for positioning applications. A sub-space approach is used for the estimation of the multipath time of arrival, and a state-space approach is exploited for tracking the direct path. The developed framework is applied to real LTE signals collected using a portable experimental setup during a car drive in the town of Rapperswil, Switzerland. The pseudoranges derived from the tracking of the DP TOA are then compared to the ranges from the considered LTE base stations calculated using GPS, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed approach.