Single Anchor Localization by Combining UWB Angle-of-Arrival and Two-Way-Ranging: an Experimental Evaluation of the DW3000

Ultra-wideband (UWB) provides cm-level accuracy even in large-scale industrial settings. However, UWB deployment is hindered by the need for fixed infrastructure nodes requiring power and cabling. To address these challenges, a single anchor node can provide position estimates by leveraging both time and phase information, thereby simultaneously estimating both the distance and 2D angle-of-arrival (AoA) of incoming UWB packets. At this moment no studies evaluate the accuracy of commercial single-anchor node deployments. Therefore, in this study, we empirically validate a single-anchor localization setup utilizing the IEEE802.15.4z compliant DW3000 transceiver. Our results indicate that estimating the angle based on the channel impulse response (CIR) yields greater accuracy compared to values reported by the transceiver. When integrating angle and distance information, a single anchor achieves a mean accuracy of up to 43.3 cm over a 50 m
²
area. Furthermore, we observe that increasing the number of anchors improves the accuracy of the localization system. Interestingly, the inclusion of additional angular information when 3 or more anchor nodes are present does not significantly enhance system performance compared to traditional TWR positioning algorithms.