Anchor-oriented Time and Phase-based Concurrent Self-localization using UWB Radios

Abstract

Positioning plays an important role in many IoT applications. Ultra-wideband (UWB)-based positioning is an alternative to GPS in indoor environments due to its multipath resilience and its accuracy and precision. In the presence of a large number of targets to localize, conventional UWB localization fails to provide a practical location update rate. UWB concurrency in conjunction with self-localization has been used in both time-based and phase-based localization making the targets to localize (tags), a relatively passive device with the sole role of receiving wireless packets and calculating its own location. More recently, phase-based concurrent angle estimation also offloaded the hardware complexity and cost to the anchors instead of the tags. In this work, our anchor-oriented approach combines inter-anchor and intra-anchor concurrency for phase-based localization but also allows time-based localization. Our experimental evaluation on a testbed consisting of Decawave platform shows that our technique is not only practical but also performant.