Ranging errors in UWB networks and their detectability

Over the last decades Ultra-Wideband (UWB) radio communication has gathered an increasing interest in the research community, due to its unique features resulting out of large bandwidth like the capability for precise localization. Nevertheless in dense indoor environments, multi-path propagation often leads to unpredictable errors in the time-of-flight based ranging process, leading to unreliable range measurements. In this paper, we present measurements within different environments and discuss the effects during the ranging process that lead to incorrect measurements. As the key contribution of our paper we present a method of gaining a quality measure for obtained range measurements, which enables to filter out erroneous measurements. In addition, we show first results applying this approach.