Locating mobile stations with statistical directional propagation model

Recently, mobile location estimation is drawing considerable attention in the field of wireless communications. Among different mobile location estimation methods, the one which estimates the location of mobile stations with reference to the wave propagation model is drawing much attention. This approach, in principle, makes use of the most primitive property of wave propagation - signal strength, to perform location estimation. Hence this approach should be able to apply to different kinds of cellular network. We found out that in estimating mobile location with reference to signal strength, the azimuth gain of directional antenna and environmental factors can help to improve the accuracy. In this paper, we report our study of a directional propagation model (DPM) which enhanced the traditional propagation model with these factors. We experimented our model with 3,703 sets of real life data collected from a major mobile phone operator of Hong Kong. Results show that the DPM models have significant improvement over other existing location methods in terms of accuracy and stability.