Coverage of Hybrid Terrestrial-Satellite Location in Mobile Communications

Abstract

This work studies the improvement in service coverage obtained by three different ways of hybridising (terrestrial and satellite) triangulation location methods for cellular networks. Though the authors assume that terrestrial cellular networks use Enhanced Observed Time Difference (E-OTD) in 2G or Observed Time Difference Of Arrival (OTDOA) in 3G, and that the satellite GNSS uses Assisted Global Positioning System (A-GPS), their analysis can easily be generalized to address any other triangulation method. A simple analytical model is presented, which is used for evaluating the service coverage of each approach. The numerical results show how hybridisation leads to a high improvement and an easy balance between traffic and geographical coverage.