Position location by time reversal in communication networks

Abstract

Multipath effects are significant in urban or indoor communications. Current position location techniques such as TDOA suffer from multipath effects, which reduces the estimation accuracy. In this paper we propose time-reversal in a wireless communication network, where a mobile terminal wants to determine, through feedback, its own position in the request of the base station. The proposed method improves the estimation accuracy and reduces the estimation variance compared with correlation based method. We derive the closed form of the Cramer-Rao bound (CRB) on the time reversal estimation and the correlation estimation, showing that time reversal achieves a smaller CRB than the correlation method. Numerical examples are presented to illustrate the behavior of these bounds.