Magnitude-Based Angle-of-Arrival Estimation, Localization, and Target Tracking

Abstract

In this paper, we are interested in estimating the angle of arrival (AoA) of all the signal paths arriving at a receiver array using only the corresponding received signal magnitude measurements (or, equivalently, the received power measurements). Typical AoA estimation techniques require phase information, which is not available in some WiFi/Bluetooth receivers, and is further challenging to properly measure in a synthetic antenna array due to synchronization issues. In this paper, we then show that AoA estimation is possible with only the received signal magnitude measurements. More specifically, we first propose a framework, based on the spatial correlation of the received signal magnitude, to estimate the AoA of signal paths from fixed signal sources (both active transmitters and passive objects). Next, we extend our AoA estimation framework to a dual setting, and further utilize a particle filter, to show how a moving target (both active transmitters and passive robots/humans) can be tracked, based on only the received signal magnitude measurements of a small number of fixed receivers. We extensively validate our proposed framework with several experiments (total of 22), in both closed and open areas. More specifically, we first utilize a robot to emulate an antenna array, and estimate the AoA of active transmitters, as well as passive objects using only the received WiFi signal magnitude measurements. We next validate our tracking framework by using only three off-the-shelf WiFi devices as receivers, to track an active transmitter, a passive robot that writes the letters of IPSN on its path, and a walking human. Overall, our results show that AoA can be estimated, with a high accuracy, with only the received signal magnitude measurements, and can be utilized for high quality angular localization and tracking.