Probabilistic Positioning via Ray Tracing With Noisy Angle of Arrival Measurements

We consider the positioning problem in non line-of-sight (NLoS) situations, where several base stations (BS) try to locate a user equipment (UE) based on uplink angle of arrival (AoA) measurements and a digital twin of the environment. Ray launching in a Monte Carlo manner according to the AoA statistics enables to produce a map of points for each BS. These points represent the intersections of the rays with a xy plane at a given user equipment (UE) elevation. We propose to fit a parametric probability density function (pdf), such as a Gaussian mixture model (GMM), to each map of points. Multiplying the obtained pdfs for each BS enables to compute the position probability of the UE. This approach yields an algorithm robust to a reduced number of launched rays. Moreover, these parametric pdfs may be fitted and stored in an offline phase such that ray tracing can be avoided in the online phase. This significantly reduces the computational complexity of the positioning method.