Comparison of TOA and RSS based techniques for RF localization inside human tissue

Localization inside the human body using radio frequency (RF) transmission is gaining importance in a number of applications such as Capsule Endoscopy. The accuracy of RF localization depends on the technology adopted for this purpose. The two most common RF localization technologies use received signal strength (RSS) and time-of-arrival (TOA). This paper presents a comparison of the accuracy of TOA and RSS based localization inside human tissue. Analysis of the propagation of radio waves inside the human body is extremely challenging and computationally intensive. We use our proprietary finite difference time domain (FDTD) technique algorithm reported in [1] to simulate waveform transmissions inside the human body, which is almost 60 times faster than commercially available solvers used for similar purposes. The RSS and TOA of the waveforms are extracted for localization and the accuracies of the two methods are compared. The accuracy of each technique is compared with traditional CRLB commonly used for calculation of bounds for the performance of localization techniques.