Indoor Localization With Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface

Recently, reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS), which operates with the aim to manipulate multi-path signals, has been widely considered for wireless communications. In this letter, we extend the employment of RIS to indoor positioning, with the aid of ultra-wideband (UWB) technique. Moreover, the Cramer-Rao lower bound of the developed positioning scheme is quantified. Both theoretical analysis and simulation results demonstrate that RIS has the potential to realize accurate positioning with a single access point, due to its ability to mark the channel and replace traditional active positioning anchors. Moreover, it is also depicted that when the number of receive antennas is limited, time-of-arrival based positioning has a higher accuracy than that based on angle-of-arrival, due to the high multipath resolution of UWB signals.

Automated summary

This letter explores the application of reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) combined with ultra-wideband (UWB) technology for indoor positioning, and quantifies the accuracy of the positioning scheme developed. The study shows that RIS has the potential to achieve accurate positioning with a single access point, and provides higher accuracy compared to traditional active positioning methods.