Improving the Performance of TOA Over Wireless Systems to Track Mobile Targets

TOA-based tracking methods over wireless communication networks constitute a proper technology that can fulfill the requirements of critical pedestrian navigation applications in GPS-less environments. However, large positioning latencies and lack of scalability to a large number of users can limit applicability. This particularly occurs if WLAN is employed due to the traffic that is generated in sequential estimation of the pseudo-distances to the reference points. This paper proposes a strategy to noticeably reduce the latencies without degrading positioning accuracy. In addition, this work proposes a strategy that allows drastic improvement in scalability. The results of tests performed show that both easy-to-implement strategies allow achievement of the objectives.