TDoA-Based Self-Supervised Channel Charting with NLoS Mitigation
Abstract
Channel Charting (CC) has emerged as a promising framework for data-driven radio localization, yet existing approaches often struggle to scale globally and to handle the distortions introduced by non-line-of-sight (NLoS) conditions. In this work, we propose a novel CC method that leverages Channel Impulse Response (CIR) data enriched with practical features such as Time Difference of Arrival (TDoA) and Transmission Reception Point (TRP) locations, enabling a TDoA-based self-supervised localization function on a global scale. The proposed framework is further enhanced with short-interval User Equipment (UE) displacement measurements, which improve the continuity and robustness of the learned positioning function. Our algorithm incorporates a mechanism to identify and mask NLoS-induced noisy measurements, leading to significant performance gains. We present the evaluation of our proposed models in a real 5G testbed, benchmarked against centimeter-accurate Real-Time Kinematic (RTK) positioning, in an O-RAN-based 5G network using OpenAirInterface (OAI) software at EURECOM. It demonstrates results that outperform state-of-the-art semi-supervised and self-supervised CC approaches in a real-world scenario. The results show localization accuracies of 2--4 meters in 90\% of cases, across varying NLoS ratios. Furthermore, we provide public datasets of CIR recordings, along with the true position labels used in this paper's evaluation.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2510.08001,
title = {TDoA-Based Self-Supervised Channel Charting with NLoS Mitigation},
author = {Mohsen Ahadi and Omid Esrafilian and Florian Kaltenberger and Adeel Malik},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.08001},
year = {2026}
}