Characteristic Modeling of TOA Ranging Error in Rotating Anchor-Based Relative Positioning

Abstract

In this paper, we describe a rotating anchor-based positioning method using time of arrival (TOA) measurements to obtain the relative positional relationship between two locators, which can help a rescuer to efficiently determine the direction to a trapped person or help a lost person to find the direction to an exit in first responder applications. Since the TOA ranging error of this special scenario cannot be modeled by the distributions proposed for traditional fixed anchor-based indoor geolocation, a new characteristic model based on the $\alpha $ -stable distribution is presented for rotating anchor-based relative positioning. The model is verified by the Kolmogorov-Smirnov hypothesis and Akaike weights and compared with the traditional distributions. Moreover, the parameters of the model are used to improve the direction identification accuracy, further reflecting the value of the model.