Indoor positioning using time difference of arrival between multipath components

Positioning is next to communication the most important field of applications for wireless radio transmissions. This paper considers indoor positioning using wireless signals. Especially in indoor scenarios, multipath reception degrades the accuracy of the positioning device as long as the receiver is based on standard methods. Strategies to mitigate multipath effects on range estimates are in general based on the estimation of the channel impulse response (CIR). All these methods have in common that they determine the CIR in order to remove the influence on the estimate of the line-of-sight path delay. This paper focuses on multipath aided positioning by using the time difference of arrival between multipath components (TDoAbMC). Hence, the paper uses the multipath propagation of the wireless signal to allow positioning in cases of a insufficient number of transmitters or increase the accuracy otherwise. Measurements with a moving receive antenna showed, that multipath components are visible for several meters of receiver movement. To estimate and track the time-variant multipath components of the received signal, the paper uses a Kalman filter which utilizes maximum likelihood estimates as measurements. For positioning, the novel approach treats multipath components as signals from virtual transmitters which are time synchronized to the physical transmitter and fixed in their position. Additionally, using a time difference of arrival approach, the estimation of the user clock bias is not necessary. To use the information of the multipath components, the positioning algorithm has to estimate the user position and the position of the virtual transmitters simultaneously. Furthermore, the new approach does not rely on any prior information such as the room layout or a database for fingerprinting.