Performance analysis of small size and power efficient UWB communication nodes for indoor localization

Abstract

In this paper, the localisation capabilities of ultra-wideband (UWB) communication devices are evaluated. A test platform is designed to perform experiments in indoor environments, to record the data for different node set-ups and to evaluate the results in practice. The platform development comprises hardware design of the anchor and tag node, development of the PC software for communication to the nodes, collecting the measured distance data and performing localisation algorithms. At the end, some experiments are performed in both line of sight (LOS) and non-line of sight (NLOS) cases with blocking and non-blocking barriers. The experiment results confirm a distance measurement accuracy of 10 cm in LOS conditions for 85 % of the measured distances in the range of 0.5 m to 30 m. In NLOS cases an additional offset can be observed in the measurement results causing a higher relative error for short distances.