On RSS and TOA based indoor geolocation - a comparative performance evaluation

Recently wireless positioning using existing network infrastructure has become an attractive value added application in campus and local area networks. However, many complexities, intrinsic to indoor radio propagation create technical challenges for the localization algorithms to meet indoor positioning requirements. Variety of algorithms using received signal strength (RSS) or time of arrival (TOA) has been used for this purpose. There is a literature gap in performance and system bandwidth requirement comparison between RSS and TOA based techniques used for indoor geolocation. In this paper we present experimental results that demonstrate a systematic comparison between these two techniques. Using a 2D ray tracing (RT) software to create a common repeatable framework for performance evaluation, we present a comparison among two RSS based and two TOA based indoor positioning algorithms in a typical office environment