Soft Multipath Information-Based UWB Tracking in Cluttered Scenarios: Preliminaries and Validations

In this paper, we investigate ultra-wideband (UWB) localization and tracking in cluttered environments. Instead of mitigating the multipath, we exploit the specular reflections to enhance the localizability and improve the positioning accuracy. With the assistance of the multipath, it is also possible to achieve localization purposes using fewer anchors or when the line-of-sight propagations are blocked. Rather than using single-value distance, angle, or Doppler estimates for the localization, we model the likelihoods of both the line-of-sight and specular multipath components, namely soft multipath information, and propose the multipath-assisted probabilistic UWB tracking algorithm. Experimental results in a cluttered industrial scenario show that the proposed algorithm achieves 46.4 cm and 33.1 cm 90th percentile errors in the cases of 3 and 4 anchors, respectively, which outperforms conventional methods with more than 61.8% improvement given fewer anchors and strong multipath effect.

OFDM-Based Massive Connectivity for LEO Satellite Internet of Things

Low earth orbit (LEO) satellite has been considered as a potential supplement for the terrestrial Internet of Things (IoT). In this paper, we consider grant-free non-orthogonal random access (GF-NORA) in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) system to increase access capacity and reduce access latency for LEO satellite-IoT. We focus on the joint device activity detection (DAD) and channel estimation (CE) problem at the satellite access point. The delay and the Doppler effect of the LEO satellite channel are assumed to be partially compensated. We propose an OFDM-symbol repetition technique to better distinguish the residual Doppler frequency shifts, and present a grid-based parametric probability model to characterize channel sparsity in the delay-Doppler-user domain, as well as to characterize the relationship between the channel states and the device activity. Based on that, we develop a robust Bayesian message passing algorithm named modified variance state propagation (MVSP) for joint DAD and CE. Moreover, to tackle the mismatch between the real channel and its on-grid representation, an expectation-maximization (EM) framework is proposed to learn the grid parameters. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed algorithms significantly outperform the existing approaches in both activity detection probability and channel estimation accuracy.