Case Study of Target Localization Based on Hybrid and Traditional Ranging via RSS and TOA

This work addresses the problem of target localization in adverse non-line-of-sight (NLOS) environments by using received signal strength (RSS) and time of arrival (TOA) measurements. It is inspired by a recently published work in which authors discuss about a critical distance below and above which combined RSS-TOA measurements are inferior to RSS-only and TOA-only measurements. Here, we employ a state-of-the-art estimator for the considered target localization problem and study its performance against its counterparts that employ each individual measurement exclusively. It is shown that the hybrid approach is not the best one by default. Also, we propose a heuristic approach to choose the best measurement for each link in order to enhance the performance of the estimator. The new approach implicitly relies on the concept of critical distance, but does not assume certain link parameters as given. Our simulations show that the proposed approach works well, matching or even improving the performance of the best fixed choice in all considered scenarios.