NLOS mitigation in indoor localization by marginalized Monte Carlo Gaussian smoothing

One of the main challenges in indoor time-of-arrival (TOA)-based wireless localization systems is to mitigate non-line-of-sight (NLOS) propagation conditions, which degrade the overall positioning performance. The positive skewed non-Gaussian nature of TOA observations under LOS/NLOS conditions can be modeled as a heavy-tailed skew t-distributed measurement noise. The main goal of this article is to provide a robust Bayesian inference framework to deal with target localization under NLOS conditions. A key point is to take advantage of the conditionally Gaussian formulation of the skew t-distribution, thus being able to use computationally light Gaussian filtering and smoothing methods as the core of the new approach. The unknown non-Gaussian noise latent variables are marginalized using Monte Carlo sampling. Numerical results are provided to show the performance improvement of the proposed approach. © 2017, The Author(s).