Towards robust and efficient device-free localization using UWB sensor network

Device-free localization (DFL) is the method of using distributed wireless sensors to localize the target without carrying any devices. Existing DFL methods leverage the variation of narrowband received signal strength (NRSS) which is vulnerable to multipath fading, and thus results in considerable performance degradation in indoor environments. Moreover, the inefficient sensor deployment of traditional DFL involves huge human efforts, which is not suitable for emergency scenarios. In this paper, we utilize sensors transmitting ultra-wideband (UWB) signals to solve both problems. We proposed two RSS variation estimation methods based on the channel impulse response (CIR) measurements provided by UWB sensors, which turn out to be more robust to multipath than NRSS due to the fine multipath resolution of UWB signals. We also employ a higher operating frequency to enhance the shadowing loss for mitigating the multipath effect. Additionally, satisfactory sensor self-localization is achieved under the cooperative localization framework owing to the accurate ranging capability of UWB sensors. We conducted experiments in three different environments to explore the feasibility of our method. The results show that the proposed method gains much better localization performance and requires less human efforts than narrowband DFL.