Synchronicity: Pushing the envelope of fine-grained localization with distributed MIMO

• Main Authors: XIONG, Jie, JAMIESON, Kyle, SUNDARESAN, Karthikeyan
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2014
• Subjects: tdoa; synchronization; distributed mimo; location tracking; Software Engineering; Systems Architecture
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/2702; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/3702/viewcontent/Synchronicity_Hotwireless_2014_afv.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Indoor localization of mobile devices and tags has received much attention recently, with encouraging fine-grained localization results available with enough line-of-sight coverage and enough hardware infrastructure. Synchronicity is a location system that aims to push the envelope of highly-accurate localization systems further in both dimensions, requiring less line-of-sight and less infrastructure. With Distributed MIMO network of wireless LAN access points (APs) as a starting point, we leverage the time synchronization that such a network affords to localize with time-difference-of-arrival information at the APs. We contribute novel super-resolution signal processing algorithms and reflection path elimination schemes, yielding superior results even in non-line-of-sight scenarios (with one to two walls separating client and APs). We implement and briefly evaluate Synchronicity on the WARP hardware radio platform using standard 20~MHz wireless LAN channels.