Enhanced Hybrid Uplink Time Difference

of Arrival and Assisted Global Positioning

System for UMTS Users

Ilham El Mourabit, Aïcha Sahel,

Abdelmajid Badri and Abdennaceur Baghdad *

Abstract Due to the growing needs of positioning solutions serving for both
emergency cases and daily life uses, many researches are carried out to enhance
the existing techniques in a way to find a robust method that meets the
expectations of both areas. In this paper, we propose an enhanced hybrid approach
between the up-link time difference of arrival and Assisted GPS positioning
methods for UMTS users by improving the accuracy of UTDOA using the NLMS
adaptive filter instead of usual filter before performing the cross-correlation.

Keywords UTDOA · NLMS · A-GPS · Position · UMTS · Adaptive filters

1 Introduction

Location Based services (LBS) refers to services that utilizes the position estimate
of a mobile station. As specified in [1], there are four categories of location
services: commercial LBS, internal LBS, emergency LBS, and lawful intercept
LBS. The demand to locate mobile phones in the case of emergency calls is
commonly accepted as the main driving force for LBS regarding the great benefit
of such services in rescuing operations. There are different methods to obtain the
position of a Mobile Station, Based on the entity which measures and/or calculates
the position, we define the following categories [2]:
 Handset-based: In this category the handset measures the data needed for the
approximate location and calculates its own position out of this data. the
methods belonging to his type do not need any access to the network, so no
changes are imported to this one, only an upgraded phone is needed to

I. El Mourabit() · A. Sahel · A. Badri · A. Baghdad

EEA and TI Laboratory, Faculty of Sciences and Techniques Mohammedia,
Hassan II University Casablanca, Casablanca, Morocco
e-mail: elmourabit.ilham@gmail.com
© Springer Science+Business Media Singapore 2016 17
E. Sabir et al. (eds.), The International Symposium on Ubiquitous Networking,
Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering 366,
DOI: 10.1007/978-981-287-990-5_2
18 I.E. Mourabit et al.

calculate the position estimation. As an example of these techniques we find

the Global Positioning System GPS, the Time of Arrival TOA and the
fingerprint method.
 Network-based: The network measures all data needed for the handset
location and calculates it. The handset is passive in the whole progress, this
type is the more suitable for emergency positioning services. The big
advantage of this category is that no changes or upgrades are applied to the
mobile phone, however, expensive location measurement units are needed to
be added (if not exist) to the network structure. Among the commonly known
approaches of this type we have Cell-Id, Angle Of Arrival AOA, and Up-link
Time Difference Of Arrival UTDOA.
 Hybrid positioning: In hybrid positioning, the network and the handset work
together to first measure and then calculate the device position. In this category
we find the Assisted GPS and enhanced Cell-Id + RTT (Round Trip Time).

Among these location estimation techniques we are interested in UTDOA and

A-GPS positioning methods to build a hybrid solution. In the next section we will
explain the main idea of each approach then present the principle and the
simulation of the proposed method.

2 Uplink Time Difference of Arrival Technique

It is a real time locating technique for mobile phone that uses multi-lateration
(hyperbolic positioning) based on timing of received signals. Location
Measurement Units (LMUs) are co-located at the Base Stations (BSs) to calculate
the time difference measurements used to determine the location of a mobile
phone. The technique is a network-based, so it can locate even legacy phones [3].
For hyperbolic lateration, the mobile terminal’s position is determined by the
distance differences (di -dj) instead of the absolute distance d. A hyperbola is
defined to be the set of all points for which the difference from two fixed points is
constant [4]. Then two BSs with known locations determine a hyperbolic curve.
The intersection of two hyperbolic curves can determine a unique point.
Therefore, three BSs are required to locate a mobile terminal in 2D coordinates.
The handset position (x, y) can be derived from equation (1) :
d −d = (x − x) + (y − y) − (x − x) + (y − y)
. (1)
d −d = (x − x) + (y − y) − (x − x) + (y − y)

Knowing that the speed of propagation is estimated to be c = 3.108 ms-1, we

can replace the distances in (1) with their corresponding times according to the
following formula c = . After some simplification we can write the previous
equations in the form:

− =1. (2)

Which describes an hyperbolic curves. The figure 1 shows the results of a

hyperbolic lateration with three base stations to determine the location of an MS.
Enhanced Hybrid Uplink Time Difference of Arrival 19

Fig. 1 Time Difference Of Arrival hyperbolic solution

UTDOA is the best network based method in term of accuracy compared to

other solutions as shown in the table 1 [5].

Table 1 Comparing Positioning techniques accuracy.

Technique network handset accuracy
Cell-ID Both Both 100m - 3 km
AOA Both Both 100 - 200 m
UTDOA Both Both <50m
EOTD GSM Upgrade 50 - 200 m
A-GPS Both Upgrade 5 - 30 m

2.1 Enhanced UTDOA

A cross correlation is performed between the same signal received at two different
BSs, one of them should be currently serving the mobile user. A peak detection
correspond to the searched time difference value.
The received signal at the ith base station can be written as:
r [n] = A s[n − τ ] + n [n] (3)
Where
A : signal amplitude.
s[n − τ ] : delayed version of the sent signal s[n].
n [n] : propagation noise (additive white Gaussian noise).
20 I.E. Mourabit et al.

Considering that BS1 is the one actually the MS (Mobile Station) is connected to,
so it has the shortest time of arrival then the received signals equations can be
written as:

r [n] = s[n] + n [n] (4)

r [n] = A s[n − τ ] + n [n] (5)

Where τ = τ − τ is the searched time difference of arrival between the two

base stations and A is the amplitude ratio.
The formula of cross correlation equation is given as:

R ,
[k] = ∑ r [n] r [n − k] (6)

Where k is the estimation of TDOA which correspond to a peak detection.

As shown in the modeling equations of the received signal an additional term
referring to the propagation noise is attached to every version of this signal, this
term will affect the precision of time difference measurements if we perform the
cross correlation directly. From here came the idea of pre-filtering the received
signal with adaptive filters before the cross correlation so we can minimize the
noise effect to have more accurate position [6] [7].
Previous work has been carried out to enhance the UTDOA technique using
adaptive filters as a noise cancellation system before the time estimation by cross
correlation [8]. This kind of filters is controlled by an algorithm to update the
filter's coefficients in function of the received signal and the error signal. As
presented in [8] the Normalized Least Mean Square algorithm has shown better
performances and less complexity comparing to other type of controlling
algorithms (LMS and RLS).

2.2 Normalized Least Mean Square Algorithm

In the standard LMS algorithm the filter's coefficients are updated following the
formula
w(n + 1) = w(n) + μ e(n) r(n) (7)
And
μ: the convergence factor.
r (n): received signal.
e(n) : error signal defined as e(n) = r(n) - y(n) where y(n) = w(n) r(n-Δ).

When the convergence factor μ is large, the algorithm experiences a gradient

noise amplification problem. In order to solve this difficulty, we can use the
NLMS algorithm. The correction applied to the weight vector w(n) at iteration
n+1 is “normalized” with respect to the squared Euclidian norm of the input vector
r(n) at iteration n. We may view the NLMS algorithm as a time-varying step size
algorithm [9], defining the convergence factor μ as
α
μ= (8)
( )
Enhanced Hybrid Uplink Time Difference of Arrival 21

Where α is the NLMS adaption constant, which optimize the convergence rate
of the algorithm and should satisfy the condition 0< α<2, and c is the constant
term for normalization and is always less than 1. In NLMS algorithm, the filter
weights are updated by the equation
α
w(n + 1) = w(n) + e(n) r(n) (9)
( )

3 Assisted Global Positioning System (AGPS)

Global Positioning System was invented to localize a mobile device outdoor
where a clear LOS (Line Of Sight) to the satellites exist. The Time To First Fix is
related to the usage behavior of the GPS device and the actuality of the almanac
that is stored on the device. To get a fix on its position an MS needs to obtain
certain data from the satellites and this can takes some time. In case of an
emergency, the user wants the position as fast as possible and without limitations.
To overcome these drawbacks of GPS, A-GPS was developed. In A-GPS not only
the satellites but also the terrestrial cellular network (GSM, UMTS or the internet)
are used to estimate the position [10]. If the MS is not able to receive the needed
data from the satellites the request is directed toward the cellular network to
provide the data needed [11].
A-GPS technology follows the principle of D-GPS with additional assistance
data from cellular network which is used to reduce acquisition time. Assistance
data is done using variety of UMTS mobile network positioning types such as
Cell-ID, TDOA, O-TDOA and UTDOA explained previously. The accuracy of
this technique is estimated to be around 5-30m in clear areas with a direct LOS.
As shown in fig. 2, the structure of AGPS network requires a reference station to
provide assistance data through cellular network to the Mobile station [12].

Fig. 2 Structure of AGPS network.

22 I.E. Mourabit et al.

4 Proposed Hybrid Solution and Simulation Results

The GPS is a very accurate positioning system but it suffers from the weakness of
satellites signals which makes it difficult to receive it at dense urban environment
with Non Line Of Sight, unlike UTDOA, the most accurate technique based on
cellular network which signals can be received even in indoor areas.
The Flow chart of the proposed technique as shown in fig. 3 has the possibility
to locate a MS either with hybrid process or standalone UTDOA in case where the
mobile phone cannot receive GPS signal (ex. legacy phones).

MS sends positioning request to network server

AGPS

UTD
server defines the nearest LMU serving server requests UTDOA location data
the MS from LMU

LMU sends GPS navigation data to server

The server extracts satellite's positions and

determines list of visible satellite to MS and
send it
LMU performs calculation of MS
location depending on UTDOA
technique and send it to network
server
MS measures corresponding satellite pseudo-
ranges and send it back to the server

Server uses the two sets of measures from both techniques to give the estimation of MS position

MS receives the final answer to its request (POSITION)

Fig. 3 Proposed scenario of the hybrid positioning

Computer simulation was done in MATLAB software, using the DSP and
signal processing toolboxes, to build conventional UTDOA block and those of
Enhanced Hybrid Uplink Time Difference of Arrival 23

NLMS filter and propagation channel according to the COST-231 model. To

perform this simulation we consider the sent signal to be a sin wave, the attached
noise is an additive white Gaussian noise and the received signal is modeled by
the following formula:
PN
r [n] = ∑ A s[n − τ ] + n [n] (10)
where PN is the number of paths.
The accuracy of this method is evaluated using the Root Mean Square Error,
which can be defined as the difference between the estimated and the true position
of the mobile user

RMSE = ∑N [x (k) − x ] (11)

N

In figure 4, we investigated the cumulative probability of different RMSEs of

the standard UTDOA, Enhanced UTDOA and the hybrid solution. It can be
clearly seen that the positioning error has been reduced by applying the adaptive
filters to the localization method and more when associating it with AGPS.
According to the FCC's requirements for E911 location services the RMSE of the
proposed approach should be less than 100m in 67% of cases, this criteria is
fulfilled at respectively 58%, and 70% of cases for Enhanced UTDOA and Hybrid
techniques filters while the same condition can be achieved at only 15% for the
conventional UTDOA.

Fig. 4 RMSE cumulative probability

24 I.E. Mourabit et al.

Figure 5 look into the effect of the paths number in the multipath propagation
channel on the accuracy of the proposed positioning methods. Despite having the
same number of signal's paths, the conventional UTDOA is more influenced than
the Enhanced UTDOA and hybrid techniques. it is noticed that the adaptive
filtering and AGPS compensates the noise and multipath effect on the
measurements precision.

Fig. 5 Multipath effect

5 Conclusion
As shown in the study carried out through this paper, hybrid solution based on
enhanced UTDOA using adaptive filtering and Assisted GPS can increase
enormously the accuracy of mobile positioning, and compensate the degradation
caused by the propagation noise and multipath. In our case the enhancement was
investigated in a fixed and known mobile position in outdoor environment using a
sine wave to model the sent signal, for future work, the cellular signal will be
defined following the standards and this technique would be generalized to take in
charge the mobility of users and extended to indoor areas by defining a moving
path for the handset, managing the handover between cells and the use of different
propagation models with Distributed Antenna Systems (DAS).

Related Work. The concept of using adaptive filters to enhance the Uplink time
difference of arrival technique was the subject of previous papers [13][14], but
this work did not limit the study on the enhancement of UTDOA by the adaptive
filtering and introduced a hybrid solution with the Assisted-GPS.
Enhanced Hybrid Uplink Time Difference of Arrival 25

Acknowledgment This work falls within the scope of telecommunication projects. Our
sincere thanks to the Faculty of Sciences and Technology, Hassan II University,
Mohammedia, Morocco, for providing us an opportunity to carry out our work in a well-
equipped laboratory (EEA&TI). We are also thankful to all our colleagues who helped us
while working on this project.

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