Effect of Bandwidth and Antenna Directivity on the Range Estimation Accuracy in a Multipath Environment

The accurate detection of the direct path in a dense multipath environment is vital for reliable performance of time-based and angle-of-arrival (AOA) based location estimation techniques. This paper investigates the effect of measurement bandwidth and antenna directivity on the detection of the direct path in a typical indoor scattering environment. It is experimentally shown that the ranging error diminishes with increase in measurement bandwidth and the standard deviation of the root mean square ranging error (RMSRE) is reduced by using directional transmit antennas. The results are obtained in a line-of-sight (LOS) propagation environment and are based on the time-of-arrival (TOA) based ranging technique.