The 4th IEEE International Symposium on Wireless Systems within the International Conferences on Intelligent Data Acquisition and

Advanced Computing Systems

20-21 September, 2018, Lviv, Ukraine

Performance Analysis of TDOA-based Indoor

Positioning Systems using Visible LED Lights
Aqsa Naeem1 , Naveed Ul Hassan1 , Muhammad Adeel Pasha1 , Chau Yuen2 , Axel Sikora3
1 Department of Electrical Engineering, Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), Lahore, Pakistan.
(Email: aqsanf@gmail.com, naveed.hassan@lums.edu.pk, adeel.pasha@lums.edu.pk)
2 Engineering Product Development, Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD), Singapore.
(Email: yuenchau@sutd.edu.sg)
3 Institute of Reliable Embedded Systems and Communication Electronics, Hochschule Offenburg, Germany.
(Email: axel.sikora@hs-offenburg.de)

Abstract — Recently, the demand for scalable, efficient Z

and accurate Indoor Positioning Systems (IPS) has seen
a rising trend due to their utility in providing Location
Based Services (LBS). Visible Light Communication (VLC) 2
based IPS designs, VLC-IPS, leverage Light Emitting Diodes
(LEDs) in indoor environments for localization. Among 4 1 5
VLC-based designs, Time Difference of Arrival (TDOA)
based techniques are shown to provide very low errors in the 3
relative position of receivers. Our considered system consists
of five LEDs that act as transmitters and a single receiver
(photodiode or image sensor in smart phone) whose position Y
coordinates in an indoor environment are to be determined. O
As a performance criterion, Cramer Rao Lower Bound
(CRLB) is derived for range estimations and the impact Receiver
of various factors, such as, LED transmission frequency,
position of reference LED light, and the number of LED
lights, on localization accuracy has been studied. Simulation X
results show that depending on the optimal values of these
factors, location estimation on the order of few centimeters
can be realistically achieved. Figure 1. Generic Block Diagram of an LED-based VLC-IPS
where 1-5 are LED transmitters placed on the ceiling and the
Keywords — Indoor Localization, Cramer Rao Lower receiver, whose position is to be determined, is located
Bound; Visible LED; TDOA-VLC somewhere in the room.

I. I NTRODUCTION
Over the last decade, the rapid proliferation of wireless
devices (smart phones, smart watches) has led to the
development of ancillary Internet of Things (IoT) ser-
vices, such as, Location Based Services (LBS) in indoor
environments. Indoor LBS applications can benefit a wide
range of consumers for surveillance, health monitoring,
disaster management, asset monitoring, robot navigation,
building management, etc., [1]–[6]. However, successful
LBS application development requires the ability to de-
termine the location coordinates of a receiver with high
accuracy and low cost.
Among the available options for position determina-
tion in indoor environment, Visible Light Communication
(VLC) based Indoor Positioning System (IPS) designs,
VLC-IPS, have the advantage of leveraging the exist-
ing Light Emitting Diode (LED) lighting infrastructure
This research is supported by Ignite, formerly known as National ICT
R&D Fund, Pakistan, through grant number SRG-129.
readily available inside buildings. As shown in Figure 1,
in such designs, the ceiling LED lights are used as
transmitters, and a light sensor (such as, a photodiode
or an image sensor) is used as a receiver whose location
coordinates are required to be determined [7].
VLC-IPS designs can exploit the variations in Received
Signal Strength (RSS), Time of Arrival (TOA) and Time
Difference of Arrival (TDOA) of the signals that are
transmitted by various LEDs [8]. However, there are
certain practical limitations on the use of RSS and TOA in
such systems. For instance, the performance of RSS-based
VLC-IPS is degraded if the receiver lies in areas where the
available light intensity is significantly poor. Moreover,
the reflection of signals may also have adverse effects
on RSS that can reduce the localization accuracy [9].
Similarly, TOA-based VLC-IPS require perfect synchro-
nization between LEDs and receiver to have accurate
estimates of time of arrival of signals from different LED

978-1-5386-7587-8/18/$31.00 ©2018 IEEE 103

 5m
LED-2
LED-4 LED-1 LED-5
5m
LED-3
Figure 2. LED arrangement on ceiling of the room
sources. On the other hand, TDOA-based VLC-IPS do not
depend on the received light intensity and therefore can
provide relatively better performance even in poorly lit
areas [8]. Consequently, TDOA-based VLC-IPS designs
have the potential to provide extremely low localization
errors that are in the range of a few centimeters [10], [11].
One primary tool to establish and compare the per-
formance of various systems is through the determina-
tion of the Cramer Rao Lower Bound (CRLB) [12].
For RSS- and TOA-based VLC-IPS, existing literature
provides CRLB [13]–[16]. However, such analysis is not
yet available for TDOA-based VLC-IPS. In this paper,
we are bridging this gap and derive the CRLB on the
localization accuracy of TDOA-based VLC-IPS designs.
We also identify the conditions and study the impact of
different factors that minimize the bound and could result
in maximization of localization accuracy.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section II
describes the system model that is used to evaluate the
performance of TDOA-based VLC-IPS. In Section III,
CRLB is derived for TDOA-based systems. Section IV
provides the simulation results and discusses the factors
that affect the localization accuracy. The paper is finally
concluded in Section V.
II. S YSTEM M ODEL
In this section, we describe the system model that is
used to analyze the localization accuracy. We assume that
there are N LEDs installed on the ceiling. Each LED is
transmitting with an average power Pt . Figure 2 shows
the LED arrangement on the ceiling, while the overall
placement of the transmitter and receiver is shown in
Figure 1 where 1 to 5 are the five LEDs. We assume
Frequency Division Multiplexing (FDM) where each LED
is assigned a different modulation frequency, fi , at which
it transmits its location coordinates. For TDOA measure-
ments, LED-1 is designated as a reference LED with a
modulation frequency f1 . The transmission frequencies of
all other LEDs are assumed to be odd multiples of f1 [10].
104
Let si (t) represent the ranging signal for ith LED as,
si (t) = w(t)(Pt + Pt cos(2πfi t)), i = 1, . . . , N (1)
where, w(t) is a windowing signal that ensures non-
negativity of si (t) for Intensity Modulation/Direct De-
tection (IM/DD) reception [14]. Assuming Line of Sight
(LOS) link, the signal received by the photodiode (PD)
receiver is given by,

N
y(t) = G si (t) ⊗ hi (t) + n(t) (2)
i=1
where G is the responsiveness of the PD, hi (t) is the
optical channel impulse response and n(t) is additive
white Gaussian noise (AWGN).
As shown in Figure 3, a bandpass filter (BPF) bank
separates out the individual LED signals, denoted by
vi (t), which in terms of time difference of arrival (τi )
are given by [10],
vi (t) = K̃i cos (2πfi (t − τi )) + n(t) (3)
where K̃i captures the effect of signal attenuation, τi =
di th
c , di is the distance between i LED and the receiver
and c is the speed of light. Let ri = (xi , yi ) denote
the location coordinates of the ith LED. Similarly, let
r = (x, y) denote the unknown location coordinates of the
receiver. The Euclidean distance
 between the receiver and
the ith LED is equal to di = (x − xi )2 + (y − yi )2 .
For obtaining TDOA measurements, LED-1 is taken
as a reference and it is paired with each of the re-
maining LEDs to get different measurement sets. Each
signal is passed through the frequency down  converter
 
block, which multiplies vi (t) with cos 2π fi − f21 t
followed by a low pass filter. The phase difference be-
tween the resulting signal and that of LED-1 is measured
(e.g., using Hilbert transform method). Using the phase
difference, noisy estimates of {Δdi,1 = di − d1 }N i=2 can
be obtained (the derivation is given in [10]). Let,
zi,1 = Δdi,1 + ni,1 , i = 2, . . . , N (4)
where, ni,1 is the noise in the estimation of Δdi,1 .
As in [17], we assume ni,1 to be zero mean additive
2
white Gaussian noise with variance σi,1 . Let, Δd =
[Δd2,1 Δd3,1 . . . ΔdN,1 ]T and z = [z2,1 z3,1 . . . zN,1 ]T (T
denotes the transpose operation). Using Δd, the unknown
location coordinates of the receiver can be determined as
explained in [10]. However, in actual practice, the location
has to be estimated based on the noisy estimates z that
impacts the performance.
III. C OMPUTATION OF THE CRLB
The derivation of the CRLB for TDOA-based VLC-
IPS requires the computation of the inverse of Fisher
 Transmitter Channel Receiver

si (t) y(t) vi (t) Freq. Down Conversion

LED Array Photodiode BPF Bank and TDOA Estimation

n(t)

Figure 3. Block diagram of the overall communication having the channel noise, the transmitter and the receiver

Information Matrix (FIM), which is denoted by J. FIM –”ƒ•‹––‡”

provides the lower bound on the error covariance of
an estimate of the receiver’s position that is given by
E[(r̂ − r)(r̂ − r)T ], where E[.] is the expectation operator. IL
Since this estimation is lower bounded by the FIM, we
have, E[(r̂ − r)(r̂ − r)T ] ≥ J−1 . In general, J is expressed Š †L
7 5
as,
‫ڧ‬L

J = E[∇r ln p(z|r)(∇r ln p(z|r))T ] (5)

where ∇r is the gradient operator. Assuming that
”‡…‡‹˜‡”
the noise variance is dependent on the PD’s location
coordinates, r, the entries of J in (5) are given by [12],
Figure 4. Transmitter and receiver geometry and angles
 T  
∂Δd(r) ∂Δd(r)
Jij = Σ−1 (r)
∂ri ∂rj ment is given as [14],
 
1 −1 ∂Σ(r) −1 ∂Σ(r)
+ tr Σ (r) Σ (r) (6)
2 ∂ri ∂rj 1
στ̂2i ≥ (9)
where Σ(r) is the distance dependent covariance matrix 8π 2 βi2 γi
and tr is the trace operator. Since we have LED-1 as our where βi is the effective bandwidth of the received
reference signal, the likelihood function p(zi,1 |r) that is signal given by βi2 = (1/3)fi2 as is defined in [14] and
required to compute the entries of FIM in (5) is given by, γi is the received SNR due to ith LED.

The CRLB on the distance estimate di can be obtained
1 1 by taking the product of στ̂i and c, i.e., σd2i ≥ c2 στ̂2i .
p(zi,1 |r) =  exp − 2 (zi,1 − Δdi,1 )2 (7) Assuming that the two TOAs measurements are uncor-
2
2πσi,1 2σi,1
related, CRLB on the variance of TDOA measurements,
2
σi,j , can be computed by adding the individual variances
Note that this likelihood function is computed under the 2
of the TOA measurements [12], i.e., σi,j ≥ σd2i + σd2j .
assumption of AWGN channel. Furthermore, the result of
using LED-1 as a reference source is that all the measure- In our system model with IM/DD, since the average
ments of range differences become correlated. Therefore, received power is Pri = Hi (0)Pt , (with Hi (0) as the DC
the associated covariance matrix, Σ, becomes [17], channel gain and Pt as the transmit power), the received
⎡ 2 ⎤ SNR, γi is,
σ1 + σ22 σ12 ··· σ12
⎢ σ12 σ12 + σ32 · · · σ12 ⎥
⎢ ⎥ G2 Pr2i G2 Hi2 (0)Pt2
Σ(r) = ⎢ .. .. . .. ⎥ (8) γi = =
⎣ . . . . . ⎦ N0 N0
(10)
2 2 2 2
σ1 σ1 · · · σ 1 + σN
where N0 is the single-sided power spectral density of
where, σ12 + σi2 = σi,1
2
. As TDOA measurements can be noise. Assuming Lambertian channel model with mode
considered as a difference between two uncorrelated time number equal to unity, the DC channel gain Hi (0) is
2
of arrival (TOA) measurements, σi,1 can be computed given by, Hi (0) = (Ar cos(φi ) cos(θi ))/(πd2i ) where Ar
from the variance of individual TOA measurements. In is the area of the receiver. Assuming the geometry of
general, the CRLB on the variance of ith TOA measure- LED transmitter and receiver as shown in Figure 4, it

105
is obvious that θi , which is the incidence angle is equal   
to the transmission angle, φi . Moreover, cos(φi ) = h/di  
where h is the vertical distance of the LEDs from the 
receiver. Thus, we obtain,  




 
G2 A2r h4 Pt2 m 
γi = = 8 (11)  
π 2 d8i N0 di
  
where m = (G2 A2r h4 Pt2 )/(π 2 N0 ). Since LEDs trans-
mit at frequencies which are odd multiples of reference   
     

frequency f1 , we can express fi as fi = (2i − 1)f1 ∀i = 


2
1, ..., N . Therefore, the CRLB on the variance, σi,j , in
our system is equal to,
Figure 5. Distance dependent standard deviation

2 a2 d8i d8j   
σi,j ≥ + (12)
(f1 )2 (2i − 1)2 (2j − 1)2  

 
where a2 = (3c2 )/(8π 2 m). Once the variances are
known, Σ is also determined.   



 
IV. S IMULATION R ESULTS AND D ISCUSSION 
 
We assume a simulation setup of a 5 m×5 m×3 m room   
with five LEDs installed in an arrangement as is shown in  
Figure 2. The reference LED is placed in the center of the 
     

array such that it is equidistant from the rest of LEDs and
a uniform illumination is obtained. Each LED transmits
with the same power, Pt = 12W and has a LOS link
with the receiver which is assumed to be on the ground
level. The PD has a responsiveness of 0.45 A/W and an
area of 1 cm2 . As far as noise disturbances are concerned,
there can mainly be three types of disturbances, viz. noise
from other light sources, electronics noise and shot noise.
We are assuming that there are no other light sources
in our room except for the 5 LED panels placed at the
ceiling of the room. The electronics and shot noise can
be both approximated as additive white Gaussian noises
(AWGN) and their combined noise variance is assumed
to be somewhere between −120 dBm to −180 dBm as
modeled and used by the previous published work [10],
[18], [19]. We are assuming the noise variance to be
−120 dBm to be on the worse side of the noise level and
the frequency of the reference LED-1, f1 , is taken to be
1 MHz. Making a grid of the room with spacing equal to
0.1 m, we determine the distance dependent variance and
the CRLB on the localization accuracy of the system.
The localization accuracy provided by TDOA-based
VLC-IPS depends on several factors including LED trans-
mission frequency, position of reference LED light and
the number of LEDs. The impact of these factors on the
localization accuracy is illustrated by the plots given in
Figures 5-7. Figure 5 shows that the standard deviation
of TDOA-based measurements in the system is dependent
on the distance between the transmitter and the receiver.
Note that the reference LED-1 is installed at location
coordinates (2.5m, 2.5m) at a height of 3m. Similarly,
106

Figure 6. Results for the Cramer Rao lower bound (CRLB)
achieved for TDOA-based VLC-IPS
in Figure 6, we plot the distance-dependent CRLB of the
system. We obtain this plot by taking the square root of
the inverse of FIM, J. The isolines of constant CRLB
form ellipses with increased accuracy in the inner most
area. From both of these plots, it can be seen that the
farther is the position of the receiver from the reference
LED, the greater is the deviation of the estimated position
from the original position (the color bar shows the degree
of deviation in m).
The deviation of TDOA measurements also depends on
the number of LEDs and the transmission frequency of
the reference LED as is shown in Figure 7. A significant
improvement in the accuracy is seen when the number of
LEDs is increased to 3 from 5. However, the influence on
the variance becomes less prominent with further addition
of LEDs to the array. Moreover, with an increase in the
2
frequency, the variance, σi,j , decreases. From the plot,
it can be seen that the reference frequency (f1 ) must
be at least 1 MHz after which the curve begins to level
off. This result is consistent with already published work
on TDOA-based VLC-IPS designs. This is because of
the fact that when f1 is less than 1 MHz, the mean
localization error is increased as the frequency is inversely
proportional to the resolution, and it has a direct impact
on the localization error [20]. It is worth mentioning

Distance dependent variance [m2]
0.25
0.2
0.15
0.1
0.05
0 Yuen, C.:, “Single LED Ceiling Lamp Based Indoor Positioning
0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9 1 1.1 1.2 1.3
Frequency of the reference LED (MHz)
Figure 7. Dependence of variance on the frequency of
reference LED and the number of LEDs
that the accuracy performance obtained through TDOA-
based VLC-IPS is comparable to that obtained through
RSS [12]. However, unlike latter, the performance of the
former is not degraded by reduced signal strength of the
incoming light signals, which makes the former an apt
choice for highly accurate VLC-IPS.
V. C ONCLUSION
We have analyzed the theoretical accuracy of a TDOA-
based VLC-IPS design by computing the CRLB. We
also identified the factors that influence this bound. The
results show that with 5 LEDs and a reference frequency
of 1 MHz, TDOA-based systems can localize a receiver
within an accuracy of few centimeters, making it an apt
choice for implementation in accurate indoor localization
applications.
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