Location of mobile terminals using time measurements and survey points

Mobile terminal location has attracted much interest for its applications in emergency communications, location-sensitive browsing, and resource allocation. This paper introduces the use of nonparametric kernel-based estimators for location of mobile terminals using measurements of propagation delays. It is demonstrated that these estimators perform better than the previously used parametric maximum likelihood estimators for the case of a simulated microcell environment with line-of-sight (LOS) and non-line-of-sight (NLOS) radio propagation at several different levels of measurement noise. Their performance is not greatly degraded by NLOS effects. Methods for calculating good values for parameters of the kernel functions are demonstrated, as well as the robustness of the estimators when the values of the parameters vary from the optimal points. A lower bound on the mean square error of location estimation that considers the transition between LOS to NLOS propagation over short distances is presented. It is demonstrated the proposed location estimation method comes close to meeting this bound.