Channel Modeling and Its Impact on Localization

This chapter reviews concepts and models for wireless channels that are critical to localization systems. It discusses the impact of channel modeling on the design of radio system and investigates key channel parameters for different localization techniques. Channel parameters essential to position location methods such as time‐of‐arrival (TOA) and direction‐of‐arrival (DOA), and line‐of‐sight (LOS) and non‐line‐of‐sight (NLOS) localization are discussed. One of the most common statistics in a NLOS transmission for the fade amplitude is the Rayleigh distribution. The received signal is an addition of a number of signals from different paths. This addition leads to a Rayleigh distribution. Inhomogenous refers to dispersive media with spatially or temporally varying electromagnetic (EM) properties. In inhomogenous channels, each node might be placed in an electromagnetically diverse medium. There are many challenging tasks in inhomogenous media, including localization, characterization, layer thickness estimation, irregularity detection, high‐resolution TOA measurements and straight‐line range estimation.