Indoor Direct Positioning With Imperfect Massive MIMO Array Using Measured Near-Field Channels

In this article, we focus on indoor direct positioning using a practical massive multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) array with imperfections. First, the imperfect array needs to be calibrated in an anechoic chamber from the view of array signal processing. This brings inconveniences due to the large size of massive MIMO systems. To solve this problem, we propose onsite calibration, where a banded calibration matrix, calibrating both phase-gain error and mutual coupling, can be estimated by performing least-squares on the measure near-field channels, i.e., the site survey data. The feasibility of this calibration method can be explained by that the non-line-of-sight (NLOS) channel is able to be modeled using Rayleigh fading; i.e., the sum of the multipath components can be treated as Gaussian noise. Then, to estimate the user position, we propose a new two-stage direct positioning scheme. In the first stage, the coarse position is obtained via global search-based conventional beamforming (CBF) using a global calibration matrix. In the second stage, fine positioning is achieved via local search-based multiple signal classification (MUSIC) using a local calibration matrix. The proposed method is computationally efficient, insensitive to model order selection, free of dense site survey, and robust to partial line-of-sight (LOS) blocking. Finally, the proposed method is verified by practical measurements from a distributed array (DA), uniform linear array (ULA), and uniform rectangular array (URA), and compared with a deep learning positioning-method. The results show that the DA with the proposed method performs the best, achieving sub-centimeter accuracy (typically below 5 mm).