%0 Journal Article
%T A Hybrid RSS/TOA Method for 3D Positioning in an Indoor Environment
%A Smita Tiwari
%A Donglin Wang
%A Michel Fattouche
%A Fadhel Ghannouchi
%J ISRN Signal Processing
%D 2012
%R 10.5402/2012/503707
%X This paper investigates 3D positioning in an indoor line of sight (LOS) and nonline of sight (NLOS) combined environment. It is a known fact that time-of-arrival-(TOA-) based positioning outperforms other techniques in LOS environments; however, multipath in an indoor environment, especially NLOS multipath, significantly decreases the accuracy of TOA positioning. On the other hand, received-signal-strength-(RSS-) based positioning is not affected so much by NLOS multipath as long as the propagation attenuation can be correctly estimated and the multipath effects have been compensated for. Based on this fact, a hybrid weighted least square (HWLS) RSS/TOA method is proposed for target positioning in an indoor LOS/NLOS environment. The identification of LOS/NLOS path is implemented by using Nakagami distribution. An experiment is conducted in the iRadio lab, in the ICT building at the University of Calgary, in order to (i) demonstrate the availability of Nakagami distribution for the identification of LOS and NLOS path, (ii) estimate the pass loss exponent for RSS technique, and (iii) verify our proposed scheme. 1. Introduction In the last few years, the interest in indoor location has significantly increased due to the importance of the 3D indoor localization with a high level of accuracy. Wireless location estimation [1] is usually based on measuring one or more radio signal propagation attributes. Different attributes of a received radio signal such as time of arrival (TOA), time difference of arrival (TDOA), and angle of arrival (AOA) have been widely applied in location estimation of a target, such as a mobile station (MS) [2¨C6]. Unfortunately, all of the aforementioned techniques require a line of sight (LOS) link between MS and a number of base stations (BSs) of known positions. In a nonline of sight (NLOS) environment, their performances can degrade significantly. In most indoor environments, NLOS, one of the dominant factors significantly affecting positioning accuracy, is inevitable. A variety of existing tests can identify whether a measurement fits in an LOS or a NLOS profile. Historical range measurements have been used for NLOS identification purposes in [7¨C9]. By applying a range scaling algorithm, the true range can be estimated by constrained minimization [7]. In [8], NLOS identification is implemented via a running variance of range estimates. Experimental results conducted in [9] indicate that the standard deviation of the range measurements in an NLOS environment is much larger than its LOS counterpart, which can also be used for
%U http://www.hindawi.com/journals/isrn.signal.processing/2012/503707/