Carrier Phase Based Autonomous Coordinate Evolution for Narrowband Positioning Systems

Abstract

Ground-based positioning systems (GBPSs), such as cellular networks and pseudolites, can provide high-precision positioning services through carrier phase positioning (CPP). Most existing methods are based on having accurate coordinates of all transmitters (TXs). In some applications, however, it could be too expensive and time-consuming to measure the coordinates of all TXs accurately, and requiring precise manual measurements severely degrades the flexibility of GBPSs. In this paper, we propose a carrier phase based autonomous coordinate evolution (CPACE) method for GBPSs, which uses the observations of multiple users to continuously improve the accuracy of TX coordinates. We first propose a Batch CPACE (B-CPACE) method and analyze its theoretical advantages over traditional single-point positioning (SPP). In the case of a large number of users, to avoid heavy burden on data transmission and calculation, we propose two distributed CPACE (D-CPACE) methods which have the same asymptotic performance with B-CPACE. Our numerical simulations prove that both B-CPACE and D-CPACE have better accuracy than SPP and reach the Cramer-Rao lower bounds. A real-world experiment shows that the proposed method can achieve centimeter-level accuracy.