LTE NLOS Navigation and Channel Characterization

Navigation with terrestrial wireless infrastructure is appealing to overcome geometrical limitations of satellite navigation for users in environments with limited sky views. However, terrestrial signals are also prone to multipath that can result in angular and range estimates that are not representative of actual transmitter-receiver geometry. In this paper, some of these propagation effects are quantified for a particular urban non line-of-sight (NLOS) scenario, based on measurements of downlink reference symbols transmitted by a commercial Long Term Evolution (LTE) base station (eNodeB) and received by a massive antenna array mounted on a passenger vehicle. Empirical results indicate that large-scale statistics for a user making multiple passes through the same urban environment look similar when represented in terms of angles and delays despite changes in orientation and drive direction. Additionally, it is demonstrated that multipath effects can be utilized advantageously; it is possible to estimate not only user position but also orientation through wireless fingerprinting.