Backscatter Assisted Indoor NLOS Positioning

Passive backscatter devices (BDs) can enable indoor non-line-of-sight (NLOS) positioning by serving as virtual anchors whose Doppler-separated signatures are observable in standard channel estimates. This paper studies continuous user-equipment (UE) tracking in corridor environments using a noncoherent power-domain formulation that avoids BD phase synchronization and remains robust to residual carrier offsets and strong multipath. The BD-dependent measurements are modeled by a log-distance law with unknown BD-specific offsets, which allows passive asynchronous devices to be used as anchors without transmit-power calibration. Based on this model, we develop a corridor-constrained maximum a posteriori (MAP) tracker with motion regularization and Huber-robust estimation. In ray-tracing-inspired simulations, the method achieves median positioning errors of 0.23--0.27 m with 90th-percentile errors below 0.45 m. In office-corridor measurements with four passive BDs at 866 MHz, it attains an aggregated median error of 0.505 m and outperforms a simple weighted-average baseline. The results show that passive asynchronous BDs can provide practical sub-meter indoor NLOS tracking while remaining compatible with existing channel-estimation pipelines and energy-autonomous BD deployments.

Self-Calibrated Indoor Tracking from Backscatter Fiducials under NLOS Transmitter Illumination

This paper studies indoor tracking from wall-mounted backscatter fiducials in corridor segments outside direct transmitter illumination. In the measured setup, the transmitter-to-fiducial links are NLOS, whereas the fiducial-to-receiver links along the corridor are largely LOS. The main challenge is that the effective fiducial response is deployment-dependent, so a fixed calibrated link budget is not reliable. We therefore use a grid-based penalized-likelihood tracker that profiles the receiver path, a fitted log-distance slope parameter, and fiducial-specific offsets directly from received powers. The resulting paths can then be reused as surrogate calibration coordinates for residual-map correction, while the same correction with measured calibration coordinates is reported only as a reference. On a short four-fiducial corridor segment, the profiled dual-band tracker gives a 0.52 m median error without measured calibration coordinates, and surrogate residual correction improves this to 0.46 m. With measured calibration coordinates, the same correction and a RADAR-style fingerprint reference both reach 0.31 m. The main remaining limitation is therefore the quality of the surrogate calibration paths rather than the structured observation model itself.