A novel TOA-based indoor tracking system over IEEE 802.11 networks

Accurate indoor positioning is required for some critical applications such as emergency rescue, fire brigade or incident management. This paper presents an innovative TOA-based tracking system over IEEE 802.11 networks intended to satisfy those requirements. The system is mainly composed of ranging and tracking. The proposed ranging technique is based on RTT measurements using standard IEEE 802.11 link layer frames and a statistical post-processing step to mitigate the noise. The tracking engine consists of a Kalman-based tracking algorithm with a new prediction step. Results obtained from a ranging measurements campaign combined with tracking simulations show an encouraging achievable accuracy of less than 0.9 m. of error for the 66% of the cases.