In the past, NLOS propagation was shown to be a source of distortion for radio-based positioning systems. Every NLOS component was perceived as a perturbation which resulted from the lack of temporal and spatial resolution of previous cellular systems. Even though 5G is not yet standardized, a strong proposal, which has the potential to overcome the problem of limited temporal and spatial resolution, is the massive MIMO millimeter wave technology. Based on this proposal, we reconsider the role of NLOS components for 5G position and orientation estimation purposes. Our analysis is based on the concept of Fisher information. We show that, for sufficiently high temporal and spatial resolution, NLOS components always provide position and orientation information which consequently increases position and orientation estimation accuracy. We show that the information gain of NLOS components depends on the actual location of the reflector or scatter. Our numerical examples suggest that NLOS components are most informative about the position and orientation of a mobile terminal when corresponding reflectors or scatterers are illuminated with narrow beams.

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Millimeter wave signals with multiple transmit and receive antennas are considered as enabling technology for enhanced mobile broadband services in 5G systems. While this combination is mainly associated with achieving high data rates, it also offers huge potential for radio-based positioning. Recent studies showed that millimeter wave signals with multiple transmit and receive antennas are capable of jointly estimating the position and orientation of a mobile terminal while mapping the radio environment simultaneously. To this end, we present a message passing-based estimator which jointly estimates the position and orientation of the mobile terminal, as well as the location of reflectors or scatterers in the absence of the LOS path. We provide numerical examples showing that our estimator can provide considerably higher estimation accuracy compared to a state-of-the-art estimator. Our examples demonstrate that our message passing-based estimator neither requires the presence of a line-of-sight path nor prior knowledge regarding any of the parameters to be estimated. 1 We refer to the scenario where only NLOS component is as obstructed line-of-sight (OLOS).

We address the problem of distributed cooperative localization in wireless networks, i.e. nodes without prior position knowledge (agents) wish to determine their own positions. In non-cooperative approaches, positioning is only based on information from reference nodes with known positions (anchors).However, in cooperative positioning, information from other agents is considered as well. Cooperative positioning requires encoding of the uncertainty of agents' positions. To cope with that demand, we employ stochastic inference for localization which inherently considers the position uncertainty of agents. However, stochastic inference comes at the expense of high costs in terms of computation and information exchange. To relax the requirements of inference algorithms, we propose the framework of position-constrained stochastic inference, in which we first confine the positions of nodes to feasible sets. We use convex polygons to impose constraints on the possible positions of agents. By doing so, we enable inference algorithms to concentrate on important regions of the sample space rather than the entire sample space. We show through simulations that increased localization accuracy, reduced computational complexity, and quicker convergence can be achieved when compared to a state-of-theart non-constrained inference algorithm.

This paper addresses the problem of multitarget tracking using a network of sensing agents with unknown positions. Agents have to both localize themselves in the sensor network and, at the same time, perform multitarget tracking in the presence of clutter and miss detection. These two problems are jointly resolved using a holistic and centralized approach where graph theory is used to describe the statistical relationships among agent states, target states, and observations. A scalable message passing scheme, based on the sum-product algorithm, enables to efficiently approximate the marginal posterior distributions of both agent and target states. The proposed method is general enough to accommodate a full multistatic network configuration, with multiple transmitters and receivers. Numerical simulations show superior performance of the proposed joint approach with respect to the case in which cooperative self-localization and multitarget tracking are performed separately, as the former manages to extract valuable information from targets. Lastly, data acquired in 2018 by the NATO Science and Technology Organization (STO) Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation (CMRE) through a network of autonomous underwater vehicles demonstrates the effectiveness of the approach in a practical application.