Ultra-wideband Positioning and Tracking

This chapter presents and discusses the fundamentals of ultra‐wideband (UWB) technology, the main issues and the methods of obtaining high‐resolution ranging and localization. It illustrates some results related to the passive localization of energy autonomous tags using the UWB backscatter principle. The chapter also illustrates an experimental case study where UWB technology has been used to track a mobile node in a typical indoor environment and tracking experimental results using a Bayesian filtering approach, with a PF implementation. It further exploits prior knowledge from the mobility and perception models. After the FCC allowed the use of UWB signals in the USA, considerable amount of effort was put into the development and standardization of UWB systems. This effort resulted in the publication of the IEEE 802.15.4a standard in 2007 (IEE 2007) as a physical layer (PHY) alternative based on UWB to the IEEE 802.15.4 standard.