Near-Field Positioning and Attitude Sensing Based on Electromagnetic Propagation Modeling

Chen, Ang; Zhao, Nan; You, Changsheng; Chen, Li; Chen, Yunfei

Abstract

Positioning and sensing over wireless networks are imperative for many emerging applications. However, since traditional wireless channel models oversimplify the user equipment (UE) as a point target, they cannot be used for sensing the attitude of the UE, which is typically described by the spatial orientation. In this paper, a comprehensive electromagnetic propagation modeling (EPM) based on electromagnetic theory is developed to precisely model the near-field channel. For the noise-free case, the EPM model establishes the non-linear functional dependence of observed signals on both the position and attitude of the UE. To address the difficulty in the non-linear coupling, we first propose to divide the distance domain into three regions, separated by the defined Phase ambiguity distance and Spacing constraint distance. Then, for each region, we obtain the closed-form solutions for joint position and attitude estimation with low complexity. Next, to investigate the impact of random noise on the joint estimation performance, the Ziv-Zakai bound (ZZB) is derived to yield useful insights. The expected Cramér-Rao bound (ECRB) is further provided to obtain the simplified closed-form expressions for the performance lower bounds. Our numerical results demonstrate that the derived ZZB can provide accurate predictions of the performance of estimators in all signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regimes. More importantly, we achieve the millimeter-level accuracy in position estimation and attain the 0.1-level accuracy in attitude estimation.

Citation

Chen, A., Zhao, N., You, C., Chen, L., & Chen, Y. (2024). Near-Field Positioning and Attitude Sensing Based on Electromagnetic Propagation Modeling. IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, 42(9), 2179-2195. https://doi.org/10.1109/JSAC.2024.3413981

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Apr 8, 2024
• Online Publication Date: Jun 13, 2024
• Publication Date: Jun 13, 2024
• Deposit Date: May 13, 2024
• Publicly Available Date: Jun 19, 2024
• Journal: IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications
• Print ISSN: 0733-8716
• Publisher: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 42
• Issue: 9
• Pages: 2179-2195
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/JSAC.2024.3413981
• Keywords: Index Terms-Near-field positioning; electromagnetic propa- gation model; expected Cramér-Rao bound; electric field; joint position and attitude estimation; Ziv-Zakai bound
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/2437919