METHODS AND APPARATUS FOR POSITIONING OF A WIRELESS COMMUNICATION DEVICE USING TIMING ADVANCE MULTILATERATION
A wireless communication device sends positioning messages on the random access channels in two or more cells of a wireless communication network, where the messages exhibit one or more characteristics enabling the network to differentiate them as positioning messages rather than access messages (604). Correspondingly, the network uses the received messages as a basis for estimating timing advance values for the device with respect to the two or more cells (606), and it commonly links the cell- specific timing advance values to a device identifier included in the positioning messages by the device (608). The inclusion of the device identifier allows a positioning node to recognize the timing advance values as being associated with the same wireless communication device, for use in multilateration-based positioning estimation.