Lightweight Non-Line-of-Sight Channel Detection for ML-assisted Bluetooth Direction Finding

Computer Science > Information Theory [Submitted on 17 Jun 2026] Title:Lightweight Non-Line-of-Sight Channel Detection for ML-assisted Bluetooth Direction Finding View PDF HTML (experimental)Abstract:Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) direction-finding is promising for indoor industrial localization, but its accuracy degrades in multipath environments where reflections and scattering bias angle estimates. Although line-of-sight (LOS) and non-line-of-sight (NLOS) detection is well studied for wide-band radios, BLE direction-finding still lacks narrow-band channel-feature representations, scalable kernel-based feature transformations, and dedicated datasets for data-driven, lightweight channel classification. To address this gap, the work introduces a controlled BLE measurement setup that generates labeled LOS/NLOS data in two distinct propagation environments. A quality-driven machine learning (ML)-based pipeline is then developed for BLE Constant Tone Extension (CTE) In-phase-Quadrature (IQ) features. First, robust quantile-based standardization is applied to reduce the influence of outliers and heavy-tailed effects. The standardized features are then analyzed using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Adaptive Kernel Density Estimation (AKDE) to verify scenario-dependent statistics and reveal LOS/NLOS separability. Next, Nyström Kernel Approximation (NKA) constructs low-rank nonlinear feature maps followed by a lightweight Support Vector Classifier (SVC) head for LOS/NLOS detection. This classifier is compared with Random Forest (RF) and Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) models. Results show that NKA improves accuracy by about 7-14% relative to the raw baseline. Although the MLP achieves higher absolute accuracy, the Nyström--SVC approach offers a more favorable trade-off between training complexity, inference cost, and memory footprint. Finally, several pipeline-calibrated posterior probabilities are utilized for cost-aware threshold selection and efficient real-time LOS/NLOS detection in resource-constrained localization systems. Current browse context: cs.IT References & Citations Loading... Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?) CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?) DagsHub (What is DagsHub?) Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?) Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?) ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?) Demos Recommenders and Search Tools Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?) CORE Recommender (What is CORE?) arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website. Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them. Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.