Error Analysis of time-based and angle-based location methods

Indoor positioning is recently highlighted and various kinds of indoor positioning systems are under developments. Since positioning systems have their own characteristics, proper positioning scheme should be chosen according to the required specifications. Positioning methods are often classified into time-based and angle-based one, and this paper presents the error analysis of these location methods. Because measurement equations of these methods are nonlinear, linearization is usually needed to get the position estimate. In this paper, Gauss-Newton method is used in the linearization. To analyze the position error, we investigate the error ellipse parameters that include eccentricity, rotation angle, and the size of ellipse. Simulation results show that the major axes of error ellipses of TOA and AOA method lie in different quadrants at most region of workspace, especially where the geometry is poor. When the TOA/AOA hybrid scheme is employed, it is found that the error ellipse is reduced to the intersection of ellipses of TOA and AOA method.