Patent ID: 8242959

Claim:
A method for designing a sparse wireless location system (WLS) associated with a wireless communications system comprising a plurality of geographically dispersed base transceiver stations (BTSs) configured to broadcast downlink beacons to be received by mobile wireless devices, comprising: performing an intelligent network design process to produce the initial network design; determining that the initial network design is affected by a downlink beacon discovery performance limiting factor; modifying the initial network design by performing at least one of the following actions to produce an updated sparse WLS design: deploying at least one enhanced downlink antenna; deploying downlink interference cancellation; determining that an Abis monitoring system (AMS) is not deployed, and then deploying at least one downlink-only location measuring unit (LMU) at an identified site; and determining that an Abis monitoring system (AMS) is deployed, and then enabling the use of Enhanced Beacon Synchronization (EBS) and AMS-derived beacon timing functions; and performing another iteration of the intelligent network design process with updated design specifications and determining whether another performance limiting factor affects the updated sparse WLS design.