Accurate narrowband LPWA ranging: Principles, performance in AWGN and multipath channels

Florian Wolf (1, 2) , Sébastien de Rivaz (1) , François Dehmas (1) , Valérian Mannoni (1) , Vincent Berg (1) , Jean-Pierre Cances (2)

1 CEA-LETI - Commissariat à l'énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives - Laboratoire d'Electronique et de Technologie de l'Information
2 XLIM - XLIM

Today approaches of radio localization for Low Power Wide Area networks do not provide sufficiently accurate ranging required by applications such as wearable health monitoring. Coherent multi-channel ranging or Phase-of-Flight (PoF) ranging provides significantly improved temporal resolution through the aggregation of sequentially transmitted narrowband signals for the same level coverage performance as legacy Time-of-Flight (ToF) ranging. This paper compares the performance of PoF and ToF under additive white Gaussian channels with both simulations and laboratory measurements. Field trials have been performed in a multipath outdoor environment and strong ranging biases are observed. Ranging bias estimators are introduced and evaluated to mitigate these damaging effects: thanks to the new approach, accuracy of 30 m in 90% of the cases may be obtained. This compares to 250 m when legacy ToF is considered.

Keywords: Narrowband localization; LPWA; range estimation; frequency hopping; multipath classification/mitigation

Domains: Information Theory [math.IT]; Signal and Image processing; Electronics

Florian Wolf, Sébastien de Rivaz, François Dehmas, Valérian Mannoni, Vincent Berg, et al.. Accurate narrowband LPWA ranging: Principles, performance in AWGN and multipath channels. EuCNC 2020 - 29th European Conference on Networks and Communications, Jun 2020, Durbovnick, Croatia. pp.148-153, ⟨10.1109/EuCNC48522.2020.9200944⟩. ⟨cea-03199084⟩