Indoor geolocation in the absence of direct path.

Severe multipath in indoor areas causes undetected direct path (UDP) conditions, which pose a serious challenge to the design of robust precision indoor geolocation systems. Based on a scenario on the third floor of the Atwater Kent Laboratory at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, we explain the reason for frequent absence of direct path, and introduce and analyze the effectiveness of two novel approaches to mitigating the large ranging errors caused by UDP conditions. The first technique exploits nondirect paths for ranging, while the second approach relies on cooperative localization for wireless sensor and ad hoc networks [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]