• Journal of IKEEE
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.25-32
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• 2010

In this paper, we analyze the location accuracy of real-time locating systems (RTLS) in multipath environments, where the RTLS complies with an ISO/IEC 24730-2 international standard. RTLS readers should have an ability not only to recover the transmitted signal but also provide arrival timing information from the received signal. In the multipath environments, in general, the transmitted signal goes through both direct and indirect paths, and then it becomes some distorted form of the transmitted signal. Such multipath components have a critical effect on deciding the first arrival timing of the received signal. To analyze the location error of the RTLS in the multipath environments, we assume two multipath components without considering an additive white Gaussian noise. Through the simulation and real test results, we confirm that the location error does not occur when the time difference between two paths is more than 1.125Tc, but the location error of about 2.4m happens in case of less than 0.5Tc. In particular, we see that the resolvability of two different paths depends largely on the phase difference for the time difference of less than 1Tc.