Target tracking in multipath environments — An algorithm inspired by data association

Many wireless sensor networks (WSN) use time of arrival (TOA) based ranging to localize and track the nodes in the network. In non-multipath environments the channel impulse response (CIR) will exhibit a single peak, which corresponds to the direct line-of-sight (LoS) path. In multipath environments, however, the CIR will often contain multiple peaks, and it is not known which peak, if any, is due to the direct LoS path. This problem is similar to the data association problem faced by many target tracking systems. Inspired by this observation, a new algorithm is presented in this paper for target tracking in multipath environments. The proposed algorithm is based on the multidimensional assignment formulation for data association. Through simulations the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is confirmed.