Dynamic LOS/NLOS statistical discrimination of wireless mobile channels

This paper presents the problem of identifying whether a received signal at a base station is due to a fine-of-sight (LOS) transmission or not (NLOS). This is a first step towards estimating the mobile station's location. We formulate the NLOS identification problem as a binary hypothesis test by exploiting the Rician factor estimation. In particular, results from wireless environments with simulated geometry showed that the new test can decide for a LOS or NLOS condition using a small amount of samples. Therefore, changes from NLOS to LOS propagation can also be tracked quickly. This information is of high significance for location purposes in a wireless cellular network since time-of-arrival (TOA) and time-difference-of-arrival (TDOA) information based on LOS connections can be weighted stronger in a location computing algorithm and hence can lead to higher positioning accuracy. Otherwise, if the connection is identified as NLOS it can be useful to adopt a 2-D signal processing (space-time processing) strategy with an antenna array, instead of using the high complexity of the TOA and TDOA methods.