Exploiting Anchor Links for NLOS Combating in UWB Localization

Abstract

UWB (Ultra-wideband) has been shown as a promising technology to provide accurate positioning for the Internet of Things. However, its performance significantly degrades in practice due to Non-Line-Of-Sight (NLOS) issues. Various approaches have implicitly or explicitly explored the problem. In this paper, we propose RefLoc that leverages the unique benefits of UWB to address the NLOS problem. While we find NLOS links can vary significantly in the same environment, LOS links possess similar features which can be captured by the high bandwidth of UWB. Specifically, the high-level idea of RefLoc is to first identify links among anchors with known positions and leverage those links as references for tag link identification. To achieve this, we address the practical challenges of deriving anchor link status, extracting qualified link features, and inferring tag links with anchor links. We implement RefLoc on commercial hardware and conduct extensive experiments in different environments. The evaluation results show that RefLoc achieves an average NLOS identification accuracy of 96% in various environments, improving the state-of-the-art by 10%, and reduces 80% localization error with little overhead.