Performance assessment of terrestrial and satellite based position location systems

The ability to support position location within wireless networks provides network operators with additional value added services, as well as users with a host of new applications. This includes navigation, localisation based services, network management and security applications. With the forthcoming roll-out of 3rd generation wireless networks there is the need to assess the performance of techniques that support position location, when utilising WCDMA as the multiple access technique. This paper presents promising results obtained from a previous performance evaluation of geo-location techniques, focused on 3rd generation cellular networks. The study is built on a measurement campaign in the Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (UMTS) band that took place in the 'heavy urban' environment of Bristol, UK. A terrestrial and a Global Positioning System (GPS) based case study are investigated.