Error Analysis of a Precision Indoor Positioning System

This paper quantifies the positioning accuracy of a new approach to indoor navigation, particularly with regard to errors in mutual clock synchronization and errors in knowledge of the locations of the reference stations. Two previous papers have described the overall system architecture and signaling format, and have developed analytical estimates of positioning accuracy in terms of transmitted signal power, bandwidth, and system geometry. This contribution quantifies the effects of the important aspects of clock misalignment and errors in the results of the algorithm by which the reference stations autonomously establish their mutual relative positions upon arrival and setup of the positioning system. The system performance is shown to be well-behaved with respect to timing errors. Data quantifying the performance with regard to both timing and reference positioning errors are presented.