Statistical Properties of Urban WCDMA Channel for Mobile Positioning Applications

The goal of this paper is to report the results of a comprehensive statistical analysis of the urban wireless channels, based on WCDMA field-measurements data. The applications of our study are in the area of WCDMA-based mobile phone positioning. The target here is the analysis of the Line-of-Sight (LOS) and Non Line-of-Sight (NLOS) situations and of the statistical distributions of their parameters, such as the delays and amplitudes. The distribution of the first arriving path is tested against several theoretical distributions, such as Rayleigh, Rician, and Nakagami-m distributions. The estimated delay of the first arriving path is compared to the LOS delay estimated via GPS, in order to detect NLOS situations. The estimation of the mobile speed, based on field-measurements data is also carried out and compared to the speed estimation based on the GPS link. The measurements were conducted in urban environment, downtown Helsinki.