• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.31 no.10C
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• pp.921-926
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• 2006

The Presence of a line-of-sight(LoS) blockage can degrade the UWB positioning accuracy for two reasons. Firstly, it makes estimation of the time of arrival(ToA) of the direct path signal difficult by complicating the multipath structure of the propagation channel. Secondly, the higher dielectric constant of the LoS blocking material than that of free space introduces excess propagation delay which will bias the range estimation. In this paper, methods based on ray tracing to reduce the ranging error resulting from the second reason are Posed. We take two different approaches; a statistical approach and a map-aided method. In the statistical approach, we establish a conditional distribution of the excess propagation delay caused by LoS blockages using a ray tracing technique. The lo6wer bound of the ranging performance based on this model is estimated. Ine ray tracing method is also used for the map-aided ToA positioning approach. UWB propagation measurement data taken in an office environment is used to examine the performance of this method.