Hybrid Uplink-Time Difference of Arrival and Assisted-GPS Positioning Technique

M. Abo-Zahhad, Sabah M. Ahmed, M. Mourad

Electrical and Electronics Engineering Department, Faculty of Engineering, Assiut University, Assiut, Egypt.

DOI: 10.4236/ijcns.2012.56040                

Abstract

A hybrid positioning system is merely one in which multiple systems are used for positioning purposes. This virtually always, though not necessarily, includes Global Positioning System (GPS) as it is the only global positioning network currently. Combination of mobile network and GPS positioning techniques provide a higher accuracy of mobile location than positions based on a standalone GPS or mobile network based positions. High accuracy of mobile position is mainly essential for emergency, military and many other location based services such as productivity enhancement, entertainment, position-based advertising, navigation, asset management and geographic information access. Assisted GPS, also known as A-GPS or AGPS, enhances the performance of the standard GPS in devices connected to the cellular network. This paper introduces a new hybrid technique for mobile location determination utilizing Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (UMTS) network, Mobile Station (MS) and GPS positioning characteristics. Different positioning techniques are chosen according to positioning parameters. The minimum required number of UMTS base stations, location measurement units and GPS satellites are calculated in this paper. The required number of GPS satellites is reduced from four satellites to three ones while using three dimension positioning and from three satellites to two ones at two dimension positioning. Moreover, MS receiver main functions including both network and GPS received paths to achieve output assisted data are discussed. In this paper many drawbacks such as indoor positioning, receiver high power consumption, delay in first time to fix position, low position accuracy as well as large number of required satellites and base stations are improved.

Keywords

A-GPS; Hybrid Positioning System; Mobile Positioning

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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