Data Association among Physical and Virtual Radio Transmitters with Visibility Regions

In multipath assisted positioning, multipath components (MPCs) are exploited for positioning as they are regarded as line-of-sight (LoS) signals from virtual transmitters. With simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), the locations of physical and virtual transmitters are estimated jointly with and relative to the user position. A robust data association scheme is crucial for the robustness of SLAM. In multipath assisted positioning, data association refers to the question which MPCs correspond to which transmitters. We say that a physical or virtual transmitter is visible to the user if the user is in LoS to the transmitter. Within this paper, we propose to map information on the visibility of physical and virtual transmitters in addition to their locations, and use such information for a reliable data association. Visibility information may stem from previous observations of a user, or from a visibility map of the scenario obtained from another user or a central entity. Our simulations in an indoor scenario show that information on the visibility of transmitters considerably improves the positioning performance by increasing the robustness of data association.