1,592 research outputs found
Sub-Nanosecond Time of Flight on Commercial Wi-Fi Cards
Time-of-flight, i.e., the time incurred by a signal to travel from
transmitter to receiver, is perhaps the most intuitive way to measure distances
using wireless signals. It is used in major positioning systems such as GPS,
RADAR, and SONAR. However, attempts at using time-of-flight for indoor
localization have failed to deliver acceptable accuracy due to fundamental
limitations in measuring time on Wi-Fi and other RF consumer technologies.
While the research community has developed alternatives for RF-based indoor
localization that do not require time-of-flight, those approaches have their
own limitations that hamper their use in practice. In particular, many existing
approaches need receivers with large antenna arrays while commercial Wi-Fi
nodes have two or three antennas. Other systems require fingerprinting the
environment to create signal maps. More fundamentally, none of these methods
support indoor positioning between a pair of Wi-Fi devices
without~third~party~support.
In this paper, we present a set of algorithms that measure the time-of-flight
to sub-nanosecond accuracy on commercial Wi-Fi cards. We implement these
algorithms and demonstrate a system that achieves accurate device-to-device
localization, i.e. enables a pair of Wi-Fi devices to locate each other without
any support from the infrastructure, not even the location of the access
points.Comment: 14 page
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