Various Positioning Algorithms based on Received Signal Strength and/or Time/Direction (Difference) of Arrival for 2D and 3D Scenarios

Overview & Synopsis

Localization has fascinated the researchers for centuries and has motivated a large amount of studies and developments in communications. The aim of positioning problems is to determine the position of the mobile device. Positioning algorithms can be divided into 3 methods: Trilateration, Multilateration and Triangulation. Trilateration utilizes the distances between the mobile device and all the base stations around to estimate the mobile position. These distances can be estimated via the Time of Arrival (ToA) or the Received Signal Strength (RSS). In Multilateration, the position location is based on measured quantities whose values are a function of the Time Difference of Arrival (TDoA) of the two ToAs. As for Triangulation, the directions of the incident signals play the most crucial role in the localization. Thus, it is also referred to as Direction-based Localization. The Direction of Arrival (DoA) of each incident wave is taken into account to solve the positioning problem. Each DoA is expressed by a single angle in 2D scenarios, and a pair of angles in 3D scenarios. There are noticeable differences between Network-Positioning and Self-Positioning. In Network-Positioning, the mobile device is directly localized based on the DoAs of the incident signals; meanwhile, in Self-Positioning, its position is estimated by the Direction Difference of Arrival (DDoA) between each pair of incident signals, because the DoA of each signal arriving to the Mobile Device is ambiguous. In this dissertation, we study all the localization approaches described above. Our spotlight is for Triangulation, which has many sub-scenarios to analyze. The results are obtained by MATLAB simulations.