Improving Cell Tower Geo-Location Using Quantum Clock Timing

Abstract

Precise round trip timing for a transmitted electromagnetic wave is key when triangulating using timing techniques i.e. TDoA, ToA and RTT. Using mobile based location services or network assisted location based trilateration, a low drift and high frequency clock is ideal. GPS has always had a leading edge it terms of accuracy when it came to triangulation, because the GPS satellites use quantum timers to keep precise time. This research work intends to minimise timing error by the use of high precision master clock from a Network Time Protocol (NTP) server driven by a caesium oscillator. In this work, we have proposed to negate the use of timing capabilities of the handheld device in calculating the time of propagation between itself and the radio access interface (Um interface) and instead use proprietary vendor quantum timing clocks. In the proposed model, the cell tower will send a time stamp on a Broadcast Control Channel (BCCH) burst. The burst will contain a time stamp on a Time Division Multiple access (TDM) time slot. Clock reference for the NTP server will be via GPS.