Rao-Blackwellized Gaussian Sum Particle Filtering for Multipath Assisted Positioning

In multipath assisted positioning, multipath components arriving at a receiver are regarded as being transmitted by a virtual transmitter in a line-of-sight condition. As the locations and clock offsets of the virtual and physical transmitters are in general unknown, simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) schemes can be applied to simultaneously localize a user and estimate the states of physical and virtual transmitters as landmarks. Hence, multipath assisted positioning enables localizing a user with only one physical transmitter depending on the scenario. In this paper, we present and derive a novel filtering approach for our multipath assisted positioning algorithm called Channel-SLAM. Making use of Rao-Blackwellization, the location of a user is tracked by a particle filter, and each landmark is represented by a sum of Gaussian probability density functions, whose parameters are estimated by unscented Kalman filters. Since data association, that is, finding correspondences among landmarks, is essential for robust long-term SLAM, we also derive a data association scheme. We evaluate our filtering approach for multipath assisted positioning by simulations in an urban scenario and by outdoor measurements.