A realtime testbed for performance evaluation of indoor TOA location system

Performance evaluation is an essential step in the development and deployment of an indoor TOA location system, in order to see the influence of multipath condition on ranging and localization accuracy. For field testing approach, multipath condition is invisible, uncontrollable and unrepeatable. Also it is usually not convenient due to system deployment. This paper presents a multipath visible, controllable and repeatable realtime testbed for indoor TOA location performance evaluation, based on RF channel emulator and Ray-tracing software. The testbed can provide accurate performance evaluation in specific indoor environments or specific multipath conditions without deployment. We evaluate the performance of an IEEE 802.15.4a Standard location system in typical office building with this testbed. The result was compared with the performance obtained in field testing to validate the feasibility of the testbed approach.