Wiometrics: Comparative Performance of Artificial Neural Networks for Wireless Navigation

Radio signals are used broadly as navigation aids, and current and future terrestrial wireless communication systems have properties that make their dual-use for this purpose attractive. Sub-6 GHz carrier frequencies enable widespread coverage for data communication and navigation, but typically offer smaller bandwidths and limited resolution for precise estimation of geometries, particularly in environments where propagation channels are diffuse in time and/or space. Non-parametric methods have been employed with some success for such scenarios both commercially and in literature, but often with an emphasis on low-cost hardware and simple models of propagation, or with simulations that do not fully capture hardware impairments and complex propagation mechanisms. In this article, we make opportunistic observations of downlink signals transmitted by commercial cellular networks by using a software-defined radio and massive antenna array mounted on a passenger vehicle in an urban non line-of-sight scenario, together with a ground truth reference for vehicle pose. With these observations as inputs, we employ artificial neural networks to generate estimates of vehicle location and heading for various artificial neural network architectures and different representations of the input observation data, which we call wiometrics, and compare the performance for navigation. Position accuracy on the order of a few meters, and heading accuracy of a few degrees, are achieved for the best-performing combinations of networks and wiometrics. Based on the results of the experiments we draw conclusions regarding possible future directions for wireless navigation using statistical methods.

Extended FastSLAM Using Cellular Multipath Component Delays and Angular Information

Opportunistic navigation using cellular signals is appealing for scenarios where other navigation technologies face challenges. In this paper, long-term evolution (LTE) downlink signals from two neighboring commercial base stations (BS) are received by a massive antenna array mounted on a passenger vehicle. Multipath component (MPC) delays and angle-of-arrival (AOA) extracted from the received signals are used to jointly estimate the positions of the vehicle, transmitters, and virtual transmitters (VT) with an extended fast simultaneous localization and mapping (FastSLAM) algorithm. The results show that the algorithm can accurately estimate the positions of the vehicle and the transmitters (and virtual transmitters). The vehicle's horizontal position error of SLAM fused with proprioception is less than 6 meters after a traversed distance of 530 meters, whereas un-aided proprioception results in a horizontal error of 15 meters.

High-Resolution Channel Sounding and Parameter Estimation in Multi-Site Cellular Networks

Accurate understanding of electromagnetic propagation properties in real environments is necessary for efficient design and deployment of cellular systems. In this paper, we show a method to estimate high-resolution channel parameters with a massive antenna array in real network deployments. An antenna array mounted on a vehicle is used to receive downlink long-term evolution (LTE) reference signals from neighboring base stations (BS) with mutual interference. Delay and angular information of multipath components is estimated with a novel inter-cell interference cancellation algorithm and an extension of the RIMAX algorithm. The estimated high-resolution channel parameters are consistent with the movement pattern of the vehicle and the geometry of the environment and allow for refined channel modeling and precise cellular positioning.

Bayesian Integrity Monitoring for Cellular Positioning -- A Simplified Case Study

Bayesian receiver autonomous integrity monitoring (RAIM) algorithms are developed for the snapshot cellular positioning problem in a simplified one-dimensional (1D) linear Gaussian setting. Position estimation, multi-fault detection and exclusion, and protection level (PL) computation are enabled by the efficient and exact computation of the position posterior probabilities via message passing along a factor graph. Computer simulations demonstrate the significant performance improvement of the proposed Bayesian RAIM algorithms over a baseline advanced RAIM algorithm, as it obtains tighter PLs that meet the target integrity risk (TIR) requirements.