Mobile Positioning in 3G Systems

Abstract

The advancement from Second generation (2G) of mobile cellular network to the Third generation (3G) introduces a new age in multimedia services. Location services (LCS) are gaining increasing commercial interest in the mobile communications industry. The capability of finding the accurate position of a mobile phone is one of the features that will help 3G systems in reaching a wide success triggering a high number of innovative interactive applications. Mobile positioning is an important feature of 3G system which is focus on the Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) radio network standard and plays a significant role in the current research.

The objective of this Master‟s thesis is focused on the positioning technique in the 3G UMTS‟s Observed Time Difference of Arrival (OTDOA) positioning method and Time based positioning techniques such as Time Difference of Arrivals (TDOA) and Time of arrival (TOA). Characteristics and factors which affect these distance estimation techniques are analyzed theoretically and through simulation the quality of these techniques are compared in different scenarios which is chosen to analysis their applicability and accuracy.

All simulations and computations in this thesis are done in Matlab.