An Efficient Ultra-Wideband Infrastructure Planning for Indoor Positioning Systems Using DL-TDOA

The ultra-wideband (UWB) based indoor positioning system (IPS) using downlink-time difference of arrival (DL-TDOA) enables a UWB device to estimate its own location with high accuracy by merely listening to UWB signals of adjacent UWB anchors. From a viewpoint of UWB anchor deployment, due to tens of a few meter coverage of the UWB signal, UWB anchors have to be densely deployed to cover the large-scale area. Also, UWB anchors should be grouped into clusters in the DL- TDOA and each cluster is assigned with the dedicated time resource for UWB signal transmissions in time division manner for interference mitigation. In particular, we have observed that blocking line-of-sight (LOS) ray component between UWB anchors may severely degrade the performance under such a manual configuration. To tackle those problems, we propose a novel algorithm, called ACTION (Anchor Clustering and TIme resOurce assigNment) based on an optimization approach. Experimental results show that ACTION can considerably improve the localization success ratio and accuracy with a feasible duration.