Hardware efficient parallel particle filter for tracking in wireless networks

Location tracking is being increasingly used across many applications. While GPS is the most widely used location tracking technology, it is unavailable in many environments such as indoors and underground. Local positioning systems (LPS) that use time of arrival based ranging can provide high accuracy location tracking for many applications. Tracking location using range measurements is a non-linear state estimation problem and the measurement noise is often non-Gaussian in environments where LPS are typically used. Hence a particle filter is an appropriate state estimator for location tracking in LPS. Particle filters are computationally complex and have a serial bottleneck that prevents straightforward parallel implementation. In this paper we present a parallel architecture for the particle filter that can be efficiently implemented in a field programmable gate array or a fixed-point digital signal processor. We show that processing can be divided into up to twenty parallel particle filters to massively increase the processing speed. Mixing between the filters is essential and we present a new algorithm for this that minimises computational complexity and memory bandwidth. Finally, for efficient hardware implementation fixed point arithmetic should be used and we empirically determine the required precision.