Positioning in Wireless Communications Systems

Chapter 8Systems

Investigating state-of-the-art and already standardized systems, for example, GSM, UMTS, and LTE, it becomes obvious that position information is not a priori part of the systems but has been seen more as an add-on to these communications systems. Hence, these systems have been designed for communications purposes only. However, encouraged by the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) requirements and the demand for GPS-free location information in MTs, systems were extended to also allow stand-alone positioning.

In the following, we describe the standardized technologies in second-generation (2G), third-generation (3G), and fourth-generation (4G) systems. Telecommunications standards organizations worked on including location technologies into their standards, for instance for GSM, UMTS, LTE, cdmaOne, CDMA2000, Wideband CDMA (W-CDMA), or WiMAX. Three main standard organizations involved in 2G systems were the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA), and the T1 Committee. T1 was sponsored by the Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions (ATIS). For 3G and 4G systems, the work has been handled by 3GPP, the 3rd Generation Partnership Project 2 (3GPP2) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), respectively.

In this chapter, we will discuss several of the above and other systems and standards that are relevant for positioning in wireless communications. First, we present ...