Patent ID: 8165607

Claim:
A method for estimating a cell location for a cell that provides wireless communication services to a plurality of mobile stations each mobile station having a Satellite Positioning System (“SPS”) receiver operating in a positioning system, the method comprising: obtaining a mobile station location for each of N mobile stations, where N is greater than 1, having a cell identifier that identifies the cell, each mobile station location being determined using the positioning system; and calculating an estimated location of a cell center based on a statistical measure of the mobile station location of the N mobile stations in the cell where the statistical measure is a maximum likelihood location, wherein calculating the estimated location of the cell center based on the maximum likelihood location further comprises: obtaining a variance, σ tj 2 , of a true position of the mobile station j relative to a true cell center position; obtaining an SPS variance, Vj, for each mobile station, j, in the cell, calculating a cell location variance, V ij , of a true position of each mobile station j in the cell relative to the estimated cell center location as a function of σ tj 2 and Vj, and using the variance, V ij , of each mobile station j of N to determine the maximum likelihood location.