Link Quality Estimation in Industrial Temporal Fading Channel With Augmented Kalman Filter

Abstract

Wireless networks attract increasing interests from a variety of industry communities. However, the wide applications of wireless industrial networks are still challenged by unreliable services due to severe multipath fading effects. Such effects are not only caused by massive metal surfaces but also moving operators and logistical vehicles, which will lead to temporal fading effects. A three-layer impulse response framework is proposed to characterize such effects, in which both the specular and scattered components vary with the spacial movement of nearby objects. In this context, a received signal strength indicator will be a noisy estimation only on the specular power and fail to describe the link quality accurately without the aid of scattered power. Consequently, an augmented Kalman-filter-based link quality estimator has been designed to track both the specular and scattered power in the distribution parameter space with constant noise covariance matrices. Experiments from industrial sites show significantly increased accuracy.