Patent ID: 7333816

Claim:
A system for identifying the position of a mobile terminal in a geographic area defined by a multiplicity of pixels and served by a wireless telecommunications network having a plurality of radio base stations, the system comprising: the mobile terminal having means for capturing a mobile-terminal fingerprint including field values corresponding to a first number of channels in the RF spectrum; and means for transmitting the mobile-terminal fingerprint; at least one reference station having means for capturing the mobile-terminal fingerprint and comparing it with a plurality of reference fingerprints each corresponding to a position of the respective mobile terminal in the network, the reference fingerprints each in turn comprising a) a field value corresponding to a second number of channels in the RF spectrum, the first number being a subset of the second number; and b) a respective probabilistic value associated with each pixel of the area and indicative of the probability that the mobile terminal is located in the respective pixel of the geographic area and associated with cartographic information for the geographic area representative of a mobile-terminal traffic probability for the respective pixel; means for selecting a predetermined number of candidate fingerprints from the plurality of reference fingerprints on the basis of the comparison between the plurality of reference fingerprints and the mobile-terminal fingerprint, the predetermined number of candidate fingerprints identifying a position of the mobile terminal in the geographic area; and means for assigning a unique position to the mobile terminal by attributing one of the candidate fingerprints to the mobile terminal on the basis of the probabilistic value.