Absolute time synchronization for mobile positioning in a cellular communications system

摘要

A method and system are diclosed for time-synchronizing a plurality of radio base stations (RBS1-4) in a cellular communications network. A reference terminal (106) (e.g., modified standard mobile terminal) is placed at known locations at each RBS site in the network, preferably as close to the base station antenna (104) as possible. The reference terminal (106) includes an absolute time reference function, which is used to synchronize the RBSs (102) with respect to a common absolute time reference. Consequently, a positioning algorithm can be used to determine the position of a mobile terminal (12) in the network with a relatively high degree of accuracy.