UWB Physical Layer Adaptation for Best Ranging Performance within Application Constraints

Abstract

Indoor localization has been a hot area of research for many years. There are many research proposals and commercial products which can accurately locate moving objects inside the buildings. Wireless communication signals have been a good alternative for existing indoor localization solutions due to their accurate results and scalability. Ultra-wideband signals can locate objects with less than 5 cm error in the reasonably inexpensive price. Despite very accurate localization achievable by UWB based systems, building a robust and reliable indoor localization system based on UWB signals remains as a challenge. In this paper, we investigated the impact of different channel configuration parameters on the robustness of UWB-based indoor localization. Based on conducted experiments, we proposed an efficient algorithm to find the best setting for UWB communication channel to meet accuracy, power, and air utilization requirements. We evaluated the performance of our framework in real-world environment scenarios, and our results show an average 20% reduction in range errors achieved by our proposed method through proper setting of UWB physical layer parameters.