TDoA-Based Self-Supervised Channel Charting With NLoS Mitigation

Abstract

Channel Charting (CC) has emerged as a promising framework for data-driven radio localization, yet existing approaches often struggle to scale globally and to handle the distortions introduced by non-line-of-sight (NLoS) conditions. In this work, we propose a novel CC method that leverages Channel Impulse Response (CIR) data enriched with practical features such as Time Difference of Arrival (TDoA) and Transmission Reception Point (TRP) locations, enabling a TDoA-based self-supervised localization function on a global scale. The proposed framework is further enhanced with short-interval User Equipment (UE) displacement measurements, which improve the continuity and robustness of the learned positioning function. Our algorithm incorporates a mechanism to identify and mask NLoS-induced noisy measurements, leading to significant performance gains. We present the evaluations of our proposed models in a real 5G testbed and benchmarked against centimeter-accurate Real-Time Kinematic (RTK) positioning, in an O-RAN–based 5G network by OpenAirInterface (OAI) software at EURECOM. It demonstrates results that outperform the state-of-the-art semi-supervised and self-supervised CC approaches in a real-world scenario. The results show localization accuracies of 2–4 meters in 90% of cases, across varying NLoS ratios. Furthermore, we provide public datasets of CIR recordings, along with the true position labels used in this paper’s evaluation.