Line Intersection Algorithm for the Enhanced TOA Trilateration Technique

Abstract

The location determination technology (LDT) is one of the core techniques for the location-based services (LBS) which has various applications, including a mobile robot, for the modern wireless communication system. The time of arrival (TOA), which is a kind of LDTs based on the cellular network, estimates the location of the specific user or object using a trilateration method based on the received signals from three base stations (BS). The true location of a mobile station (MS) is determined based on an intersection point of three circles with the radius corresponding to the distance between each BS to MS. Since the TOA method estimates the distance between BS and MS using the number of time delay, these three circles should not generally meet at a point and the performance of the location detection should be degraded in this case. In order to overcome this problem, we propose the mobile location detection algorithm based on a line intersection of the TOA geometry. In the case of those three circles do not meet at a point; in general, there are six intersection points and three lines which connect two intersection points. In this paper, we determine an intersection point of three lines as the location of a MS. The computer simulation example is provided to illustrate the location detection performance of the proposed algorithm.