Single-Site Localization via Multipath Fingerprinting

A method implemented by a base station for determining a location of a wireless transmitter, the method comprising:

• in an off-line phase, pre-collecting and storing by the base station in a database signatures and corresponding locations, wherein the signatures are extracted from wireless signals received by the base station at a given location from transmitters at known locations in a geographical coverage region;
• in an on-line phase, receiving by the base station a signal from the wireless transceiver, extracting a signature from the signal, matching the signature with signatures in the database to identify a matching signature having a best match, and selecting as an estimated location of the transmitter a location corresponding to the matching signature;
• wherein the base station uses an antenna array and multi-channel receiver to receive the signal;
• wherein the signature extracted from the received signal is a single coherent entity implicitly including the directions-of-arrival and differential-delays information of multipath components of the signal and wherein the signature is extracted from a spatio-temporal covariance matrix of the received signal;
• wherein the matching of the fingerprints comprises searching the signatures in the database for a spatio-temporal signal subspace that maximizes the projection of a received signal sample spatio-temporal covariance matrix onto the subspace.