4,905 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
Information reuse in dynamic spectrum access
Dynamic spectrum access (DSA), where the permission to use slices of radio spectrum is dynamically shifted (in time an in different geographical areas) across various communications services and applications, has been an area of interest from technical and public policy perspectives over the last decade. The underlying belief is that this will increase spectrum utilization, especially since many spectrum bands are relatively unused, ultimately leading to the creation of new and innovative services that exploit the increase in spectrum availability. Determining whether a slice of spectrum, allocated or licensed to a primary user, is available for use by a secondary user at a certain time and in a certain geographic area is a challenging task. This requires 'context information' which is critical to the operation of DSA. Such context information can be obtained in several ways, with different costs, and different quality/usefulness of the information. In this paper, we describe the challenges in obtaining this context information, the potential for the integration of various sources of context information, and the potential for reuse of such information for related and unrelated purposes such as localization and enforcement of spectrum sharing. Since some of the infrastructure for obtaining finegrained context information is likely to be expensive, the reuse of this infrastructure/information and integration of information from less expensive sources are likely to be essential for the economical and technological viability of DSA. © 2013 IEEE
Acoustical Ranging Techniques in Embedded Wireless Sensor Networked Devices
Location sensing provides endless opportunities for a wide range of applications in GPS-obstructed environments;
where, typically, there is a need for higher degree of accuracy. In this article, we focus on robust range
estimation, an important prerequisite for fine-grained localization. Motivated by the promise of acoustic in
delivering high ranging accuracy, we present the design, implementation and evaluation of acoustic (both
ultrasound and audible) ranging systems.We distill the limitations of acoustic ranging; and present efficient
signal designs and detection algorithms to overcome the challenges of coverage, range, accuracy/resolution,
tolerance to Doppler’s effect, and audible intensity. We evaluate our proposed techniques experimentally on
TWEET, a low-power platform purpose-built for acoustic ranging applications. Our experiments demonstrate
an operational range of 20 m (outdoor) and an average accuracy 2 cm in the ultrasound domain. Finally,
we present the design of an audible-range acoustic tracking service that encompasses the benefits of a near-inaudible
acoustic broadband chirp and approximately two times increase in Doppler tolerance to achieve better performance
Towards Vision-Based Smart Hospitals: A System for Tracking and Monitoring Hand Hygiene Compliance
One in twenty-five patients admitted to a hospital will suffer from a
hospital acquired infection. If we can intelligently track healthcare staff,
patients, and visitors, we can better understand the sources of such
infections. We envision a smart hospital capable of increasing operational
efficiency and improving patient care with less spending. In this paper, we
propose a non-intrusive vision-based system for tracking people's activity in
hospitals. We evaluate our method for the problem of measuring hand hygiene
compliance. Empirically, our method outperforms existing solutions such as
proximity-based techniques and covert in-person observational studies. We
present intuitive, qualitative results that analyze human movement patterns and
conduct spatial analytics which convey our method's interpretability. This work
is a step towards a computer-vision based smart hospital and demonstrates
promising results for reducing hospital acquired infections.Comment: Machine Learning for Healthcare Conference (MLHC
MetaRadar: Indoor Localization by Reconfigurable Metamaterials
Indoor localization has drawn much attention owing to its potential for
supporting location based services. Among various indoor localization
techniques, the received signal strength (RSS) based technique is widely
researched. However, in conventional RSS based systems where the radio
environment is unconfigurable, adjacent locations may have similar RSS values,
which limits the localization precision. In this paper, we present MetaRadar,
which explores reconfigurable radio reflection with a surface/plane made of
metamaterial units for multi-user localization. By changing the reflectivity of
metamaterial, MetaRadar modifies the radio channels at different locations, and
improves localization accuracy by making RSS values at adjacent locations have
significant differences. However, in MetaRadar, it is challenging to build
radio maps for all the radio environments generated by metamaterial units and
select suitable maps from all the possible maps to realize a high accuracy
localization. To tackle this challenge, we propose a compressive construction
technique which can predict all the possible radio maps, and propose a
configuration optimization algorithm to select favorable metamaterial
reflectivities and the corresponding radio maps. The experimental results show
a significant improvement from a decimeter-level localization error in the
traditional RSS-based systems to a centimeter-level one in MetaRadar
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