A New D2D-Aided OTDOA Positioning Method for 3GPP LTE System

抄録

3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Project) has started to discuss D2D (Device-to-Device)-aided OTDOA (Observed Time Difference Of Arrival) as one of the mobile positioning enhancement techniques for LTE (Long Term Evolution) systems. It is a kind of multi-node based OTDOA which directly receives D2D signals from adjacent multiple UEs (User Equipment) to measure RSTD (Reference Signal's Time Difference). D2D signals provide valuable advantages in terms of OTDOA positioning because it can guarantee more reference nodes and high SNR (Signal-to-Noise Ratio) of PRS (Positioning Reference Signal). Two typical methods for multi-node based OTDOA can be applied to D2D-aided OTDOA. Multiple OTDOA positioning is one of the multi-node based methods that averages multiple results from OTDOA; however, it cannot always guarantee high accuracy due to the non-uniform geometry of UEs. OTDOA positioning based on TSE (Taylor Series Expansion) algorithm may be one of the solutions; however, it has the initial value problem and high computational complexity due to its iterative procedure. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a novel D2D-aided OTDOA positioning method which utilizes UEs not as reference node of OTDOA but as assisting node for RSTD error reduction. The proposed method can reduce RSTD error of eNB based hyperbola by using multiple hyperbola bands. The hyperbola band indicates the possible range in which a hyperbola can occur due to RSTD error. Then, by using principal axes of hyperbolas, we estimate a modified hyperbola from the overlap area of hyperbola bands, which has less RSTD error. We verify that the proposed method can effectively reduce RSTD error and improve positioning performance with lower computational complexity.