ABSTRACT
This chapter begins by providing fundamentals of ray tracing and its benefits to analyze the behavior of the time of arrival (TOA) positioning systems for indoor geolocation and body area networking. Multipath in open areas with direct line-of-sight (LOS) communication between a transmitter and a receiver shifts the location of the peak of the pulse as a reference for TOA measurement, causing degradation in precision of TOA-ranging. In outdoor urban areas, the antenna heights are high and buildings obstruct the LOS. This chapter is devoted to the analysis of the effects of multipath on the TOA-based ranging. In frequency-domain measurements of radio propagation characteristics, the frequency response of the channel is measured, and using the inverse Fourier transform, the channel impulse response representing the multipath profile is calculated. Vector Network Analyzer is the most popular instrument used for measurement of multipath characteristics in local areas.
