A multidimensional scaling framework for mobile location using time-of-arrival measurements

Localization of mobile phones is now a very popular research topic. In this paper, a simple algorithm is devised for mobile location estimation using time-of-arrival measurements of the signal from the mobile station received at three or more base stations, via modifying the classical multidimensional scaling technique, which has been developed for analyzing data obtained from physical, biological, and behavioral science. The bias and variance of the proposed algorithm are also derived. Computer simulations are included to corroborate the theoretical development and to contrast the estimator performance with several conventional approaches as well as the Cramer-Rao lower bound.