A New Ray Optical Statistical Model for Multipath Characteristics Pertinent to Indoor Geolocation

A ray optics based statistical multipath channel model has been developed to describe the indoor multipath propagation including the important parameters such as path gain, time-of-arrival, angle-of-arrival and number of multipath components. Development of such a model is crucial for performance evaluation of indoor positioning systems. Based on a comprehensive ray-tracing database obtained on the 3rd floor of Atwater Kent Laboratories at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, multipath time-of-arrival relative to first arrival has been modeled using a lognormal distribution, angle-of-arrival has been modeled as a 3 peak doppler-like probability density function relative to the transmitter-receiver interconnection line. Path gains have been modeled using the information obtained from path arrival along with statistical object interactions such as reflection and transmission, and the number of multipath components has been modeled by a distance dependent exponential function.