Cooperative Localization Bounds for Indoor Ultra-Wideband Wireless Sensor Networks

In recent years there has been growing interest in ad-hoc and wireless sensor networks (WSNs) for a variety of indoor applications. Localization information in these networks is an enabling technology and in some applications it is the main sought after parameter. the cooperative localization performance of WSNs is constrained by the behavior of the utilized ranging technology in dense cluttered indoor environments. Recently, ultra-wideband (UWB) Time-of-Arrival (TOA) based ranging has exhibited potential due to its large bandwidth and high time resolution. the performance of its ranging and cooperative localization capabilities in dense indoor multipath environments, however, needs to be further investigated. of main concern is the high probability of non-line of sight (NLOS) and Direct Path (DP) blockage between sensor nodes which biases the TOA estimation and degrades the localization performance. In this paper, based on empirical models of UWB TOA-based Outdoor-to-Indoor (OTI) and Indoor-to-Indoor (ITI) ranging, we derive and analyze cooperative localization bounds for WSNs in different indoor multipath environments: residential, manufacturing floor, old office and modern office buildings. First, we highlight the need for cooperative localization in indoor applications. Then we provide comprehensive analysis of the factors affecting localization accuracy such as network and ranging model parameters

Statistical LOS/NLOS Classification for UWB Channels

Ultrawideband (UWB) technology has attracted a lot of attention for indoor and outdoor positioning systems due to its high accuracy and robustness in non-line-of-sight (NLOS) environments. However, UWB signals are affected by multipath propagation which causes errors in localization. To overcome this problem, researchers have proposed various techniques for NLOS identification and mitigation. One of the approaches is statistical LOS/NLOS classification, which uses statistical parameters of the received signal to distinguish between LOS and NLOS channels. In this paper, we formulated several techniques which can be used for effectively classifying a Line of Sight (LOS) channel from a Non-Line of Sight (NLOS) channel. Various parameters obtained from Channel Impulse Response (CIR) like Skewness, Kurtosis, Root Mean Squared Delay Spread (RDS), Mean Excess Delay (MED), Energy, Energy Ratio, and Mean of Covariance Matrix are used for channel classification. In addition to this, the Joint Probability Density Functions (PDFs) of various parameters are used to improve the accuracy of UWB LOS/NLOS channel classification. Two different criteria-Likelihood Ratio and Hypothesis Tests are used for the identification of the channel

Sub-Nanosecond Time of Flight on Commercial Wi-Fi Cards

Time-of-flight, i.e., the time incurred by a signal to travel from transmitter to receiver, is perhaps the most intuitive way to measure distances using wireless signals. It is used in major positioning systems such as GPS, RADAR, and SONAR. However, attempts at using time-of-flight for indoor localization have failed to deliver acceptable accuracy due to fundamental limitations in measuring time on Wi-Fi and other RF consumer technologies. While the research community has developed alternatives for RF-based indoor localization that do not require time-of-flight, those approaches have their own limitations that hamper their use in practice. In particular, many existing approaches need receivers with large antenna arrays while commercial Wi-Fi nodes have two or three antennas. Other systems require fingerprinting the environment to create signal maps. More fundamentally, none of these methods support indoor positioning between a pair of Wi-Fi devices without~third~party~support. In this paper, we present a set of algorithms that measure the time-of-flight to sub-nanosecond accuracy on commercial Wi-Fi cards. We implement these algorithms and demonstrate a system that achieves accurate device-to-device localization, i.e. enables a pair of Wi-Fi devices to locate each other without any support from the infrastructure, not even the location of the access points.Comment: 14 page

LiFS: Low human-effort, device-free localization with fine-grained subcarrier information

Device-free localization of people and objects indoors not equipped with radios is playing a critical role in many emerging applications. This paper presents an accurate model-based device-free localization system LiFS, implemented on cheap commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) Wi-Fi devices. Unlike previous COTS device-based work, LiFS is able to localize a target accurately without offline training. The basic idea is simple: channel state information (CSI) is sensitive to a target's location and by modelling the CSI measurements of multiple wireless links as a set of power fading based equations, the target location can be determined. However, due to rich multipath propagation indoors, the received signal strength (RSS) or even the fine-grained CSI can not be easily modelled. We observe that even in a rich multipath environment, not all subcarriers are affected equally by multipath reflections. Our pre-processing scheme tries to identify the subcarriers not affected by multipath. Thus, CSIs on the "clean" subcarriers can be utilized for accurate localization. We design, implement and evaluate LiFS with extensive experiments in three different environments. Without knowing the majority transceivers' locations, LiFS achieves a median accuracy of 0.5 m and 1.1 m in line-of-sight (LoS) and non-line-of-sight (NLoS) scenarios respectively, outperforming the state-of-the-art systems. Besides single target localization, LiFS is able to differentiate two sparsely-located targets and localize each of them at a high accuracy

Cooperative and Distributed Localization for Wireless Sensor Networks in Multipath Environments

We consider the problem of sensor localization in a wireless network in a multipath environment, where time and angle of arrival information are available at each sensor. We propose a distributed algorithm based on belief propagation, which allows sensors to cooperatively self-localize with respect to one single anchor in a multihop network. The algorithm has low overhead and is scalable. Simulations show that although the network is loopy, the proposed algorithm converges, and achieves good localization accuracy