Hybrid TOA/AOA Cooperative Mobile Localization in 4G Cellular Networks

this study examined hybrid Time of Arrival/Angle of Arrival (TOA/AOA) localization technique in a cellular network. Based on the linearized equations from the TOA and AOA measurements, the weighted least square (WLS) method is proposed to obtain the location estimation of a mobile station (MS) by analyzing the statistical properties of the error vector in Line of Sight (LOS) and Non-line of Sight (NLOS) environments, respectively. Moreover, the precise expression of the Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB) for hybrid TOA/AOA measurements in different LOS/NLOS conditions was derived when the LOS error is a Gaussian variable and the NLOS error is an exponential variable. The idea of cooperative localization is proposed based on the additional information from short-range communication among the MSs in fourth generation (4G) cellular networks. Therefore, the proposed hybrid TOA/AOA WLS method can be improved further with the cooperative scheme. The simulation results show that the hybrid TOA/AOA method has better performance than the TOA only method, particularly when the AOA measurements are accurate. Moreover, the performance of the hybrid TOA/AOA method can be improved further by the cooperative scheme.