Improved navigation capabilities in groups of cooperative wireless body area networks

This paper addresses the problem of navigation in cooperative groups of Wireless Body Area Networks. On-body radio devices determine their position by estimating their distance to other nodes from the measurement of the Round Trip Time Of Flight of Impulse Radio-Ultra Wideband signals. The nodes not only measure their distance to fixed anchors, but also use device-to-device measurements, which improves spatial diversity and redundancy yielding to a better localization accuracy and robustness. However, such measurements are easily biased by line-of-sight conditions and body shadowing. We propose to apply a biased version of the extended Kalman filter to alleviate the effect of measurement biases in Non Line Of Sight (NLOS) conditions and combine this filter with an NLOS detection mechanism from the literature and evaluate, by simulation, the achieved gain.