Modeling the Effect of Human Body on TOA Based Indoor Human Tracking

In time-of-arrival (TOA) based indoor human tracking system, the human body mounted with the target sensor can cause non-line of sight (NLOS) scenario and result in significant ranging error. However, the previous studies on the behavior of indoor TOA ranging did not take the effects of human body into account. In this paper, measurement of TOA ranging error has been conducted in a typical indoor environment and sources of inaccuracy in TOA-based indoor localization have been analyzed. To quantitatively describe the TOA ranging error caused by human body, we introduce a statistical TOA ranging error model for body mounted sensors based on the measurement results. This model separates the ranging error into multipath error and NLOS error caused by the creeping wave phenomenon. Both multipath error and NLOS error are modeled as a Gaussian variable. The distribution of multipath error is only relative to the bandwidth of the system while the distribution of NLOS error is relative to the angle between human facing direction and the direction of transmitter–receiver, signal to noise ratio and bandwidth of the system, which clearly shows the effects of human body on TOA ranging.