Environment-Aware Indoor LoRaWAN Ranging Using Path Loss Model Inversion and Adaptive RSSI Filtering

Abstract

Achieving sub-10 m indoor ranging with LoRaWAN is challenging because multipath, human blockage, and micro-climate dynamics induce non-stationary attenuation in received signal strength indicator (RSSI) measurements. We present a lightweight, interpretable, site-calibrated pipeline that couples an environment-aware multi-wall path loss model with a forward-only, innovation-driven Kalman prefilter for RSSI. The model augments distance and wall terms with frequency, signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), and co-located environmental covariates, including temperature, relative humidity, carbon dioxide, particulate matter, and barometric pressure, and is inverted deterministically for distance estimation. On a one-year single-gateway office dataset comprising over 2 million uplinks, the approach attains a mean absolute error (MAE) of 4.74 m and a root mean square error (RMSE) of 6.76 m in distance estimation, improving over a structure-only COST-231 multi-wall baseline with 12.07 m MAE and an environment-augmented variant without filtering with 7.76 m MAE. Filtering reduces RSSI volatility from 10.33 to 5.43 dB and lowers the path loss RMSE from 8.09 to 5.35 dB, while increasing R^2 from 0.82 to 0.89. The result is a single-anchor LoRaWAN ranging method with O(1) per-packet cost that is stable, interpretable, and practical within a calibrated indoor deployment, providing a useful building block for future multi-gateway localization and a benchmark for indoor LoRaWAN ranging.