Experimental Evaluation of Multipath Mitigation in TDOA-Based Indoor Passive Localization System Using A Beam Steering Broadband Circular Polarization Antenna

Abstract

An experimental evaluation of multipath mitigation using a beam steering broadband circular polarization antenna (BSBCPA) in indoor passive localization system based on time differences of arrival (TDOA) is presented in this paper. The BSBCPA consists of a beam switch network, four identical hexagon patch elements and their respective feeding networks. By controlling the states of a radio frequency (RF) switch in the beam switch network, four steering circular polarization beams can be excited separately for azimuth omnidirectional coverage. Combining the spatial selectivity of steering beams and circular polarization in the BSBCPA, the positioning inaccuracy from indoor multipath propagation can be mitigated. In two different indoor environments with line of sight (LOS), complex multipath, when transmitting a 20 MHz bandwidth signal in WLAN, the 2D positioning mean error obtained is 0.7 m and 0.82 m, respectively. Compared with conventional omnidirectional linear polarization antenna (OLPA), the BSBCPA can at least improve positioning accuracy by 51%. The experimental results show that the proposed BSBCPA can significantly mitigate multipath propagation for TDOA-based indoor passive localization.