Evaluation of Ultra-Wideband Position Localization for an Indoor Office Environment

Recently, significant improvements have been made in the area of indoor wireless position estimation. Issues of high power consumption and poor accuracy have stifled business and research initiatives to implement this technology to increase efficiency, save money, and obtain critical information. Investigation was done to determine if Decawave’s DWM1001 technology is capable of tracking workers within an office environment to desk level accuracy for both a static (immobile) and dynamic (mobile) tag. Evaluation was conducted under sparse and dense deployment conditions of anchors. Sparse deployments held 1 anchor per 30 meters squared. Dense deployments held 1 anchor per 15 meters squared. It is concluded that the position of an immobile node can be determined to desk-level accuracy (+/- 20cm) using Decawave’s Ultra-Wideband wireless position estimation. However, in the case of a tag in motion, a more dense system architecture is needed to achieve desk level accuracy. Due to the robustness of ultra-wideband radio waves and a sleep schedule of tag nodes, it is clear that Decawave DWM1001 technology provides many advantages for managing the trade-offs between power, accuracy, and range. Finally, the technology needs improvement in acquiring and interfacing with the position data to be fully capable of tracking a large amount of office workers.