Improved Tracking by Mitigating the Influence of the Human Body

This paper presents a location tracking system that improves its performance by mitigating the influence caused by the human body of the user being tracked. The presence of such a user will influence the signal path between a body-worn mobile device and a receiving node. This influence will vary with the user's location and orientation and, as a result, the performance will deteriorate. By making use of the user's orientation towards the fixed infrastructure nodes, the influence of the body can be explicitly compensated, hereby improving the tracking accuracy. The overall system performance is extensively verified with experiments on a building-wide testbed. Compensating for this human body shadowing results in a relative improvement of 23.6%.