Range-only Tracking in Multipath Environments - An Algorithm Based on Particle Filtering

In complex propagation environments with multipath reflections determining the time-of-arrival (TOA) of the line-of-sight (LoS) signal, which is required for localization, is challenging. As a result the localization accuracy of TOA-based systems degrade in such environments. We are pursuing a novel approach where the TOA algorithm returns not one but multiple candidate TOA values as this list is more likely to contain the LoS TOA value and the localization algorithm uses all of these to form a more reliable estimate of the node location. In this paper we present a new algorithm for localization and tracking based on multiple candidate TOA values from each anchor. We show that this is similar to the well-known data association problem in target tracking and exploit this similarity to propose a particle filter based algorithm that has linear computational complexity in the number of anchors. The performance of the algorithm is validated using simulated data.