Navigation With Cellular CDMA Signals—Part II: Performance Analysis and Experimental Results

Abstract

A framework for navigation using cellular code division multiple access (CDMA) signals is studied in this paper. Theoretical lower bounds on the navigation performance using pseudorange measurements drawn from the cellular CDMA base transceiver stations (BTSs) are derived. Moreover, the navigation performance for a mapper/navigator framework is studied in the presence of timing discrepancies between the mapper and navigator. In this framework, a mapping receiver (mapper) estimates the stochastic dynamic clock biases of the BTSs and shares these estimates with a navigating receiver (navigator). The optimal navigation performance of the mapper/navigator framework in the presence of timing discrepancies is analyzed, and a practical upper bound on the resulting position error is derived. Experimental results for a ground vehicle and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are presented. The ground vehicle results show a mean distance difference of 5.51 m between the cellular CDMA-only navigation solution and a GPS navigation solution in the absence of clock bias discrepancies. The UAV results show an improvement of 10.57 m in the root-mean-square error of the cellular CDMA navigation solution, when the sector clock bias discrepancies are accounted for utilizing the statistical model relating observed clock biases from different sectors of the same BTS cell.