Based on  the estimated  channel, this  paper presents  a new  method for  first
arrival  estimation for  positioning application  in OFDM  mobile communication
systems. In  the new  method, the  characteristics of  the information theoretic
criteria is  exploited to  estimate the  time of  arrival (TOA). The information
theoretic criteria  is established  on the  basic of  the different  statistical
characteristics of noise and the mobile channel. In the proposed algorithm,  the
calculation  of  the  autocorrelation  matrix  and  their  eigenvalues  are  not
required. Therefore, the  complexity of the  proposed method is  low. Simulation
results show that the system performance in terms of the detection rate is  very
high. An accurate estimation of the first arrival path (or the time of  arrival)
can be obtained even  though the first arrival  path is strongly attenuated  and
the system suffers from strong additive noise.