Differential Iterative Joint Estimation Approach for Indoor Target Localization

To address the sharp degradation in positioning accuracy and the lack of robustness of received signal strength indication (RSSI)-based indoor localization methods when both the reference RSSI and path-loss exponent are mismatched, a Differential Iterative Joint Estimation (DIJE) localization method is proposed in this paper. The proposed method first employs a differential model to eliminate the uncertainty caused by reference RSSI, transforming the maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) problem into a matrix eigenvalue problem to enable fast and high-accuracy target position estimation. Additionally, an alternating iterative optimization framework for target position and path-loss exponent is constructed to achieve adaptive joint estimation of model parameters and target coordinates, effectively suppressing localization performance degradation induced by parameter mismatch. In this paper, the Cramér–Rao Lower Bound (CRLB) under the dual-parameter uncertainty scenario is derived as a theoretical performance benchmark, and both simulation experiments and public real-world datasets are used to validate the method’s performance. The results demonstrate that the DIJE method can approach the theoretical limit under varying noise levels, access point (AP) densities, and complex indoor environments. Compared with classical algorithms such as RSDPE, MLE-TLLS, SOCP3, and LCJE, the DIJE method exhibits significant advantages in localization accuracy, robustness, and adaptability to initial parameters, and can meet the engineering requirements of high-accuracy and low-latency real-time indoor localization.