A Machine Learning Approach to Improve Ranging Accuracy with AoA and RSSI

Abstract

Ranging accuracy is a critical parameter in time-based indoor positioning systems. Indoor environments often have complex structures, which make centimeter-level-accurate ranging a challenging task. This study proposes a new distance measurement method to decrease the ranging error in multipath environment. Our method uses an artificial neural network that utilizes the received signal strength indicator along with a signal’s angle of arrival to calculate the line-of-sight distance. This combination results in a significant reduction of the error caused by multipath effects that common RSSI-based methods suffer from. It outperforms traditional ranging methods while the implementation complexity is kept low.