Indoor localization systems typically determine a position using either ranging measurements, inertial sensors, environmental-specific signatures or some combination of all of these methods. Given a floor plan, inertial and signature-based systems can converge on accurate locations by slowly pruning away inconsistent states as a user walks through the space. In contrast, range-based systems are capable of instantly acquiring locations, but they rely on densely deployed beacons and suffer from inaccurate range measurements given non-line-of-sight (NLOS) signals. In order to get the best of both worlds, we present an approach that systematically exploits the geometry information derived from building floor plans to directly improve location acquisition in range-based systems. Our solving approach can disambiguate multiple feasible locations taking into account a mix of LOS and NLOS hypotheses to accurately localize with significantly fewer beacons. We demonstrate our geometry-aware solving approach using a new ultrasonic beacon platform that is able to perform direct time-of-flight ranges on commodity smartphones. The platform uses Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) for time synchronization and ultrasound for measuring propagation distance. We evaluate our system's accuracy with multiple deployments in a university campus and show that our approach shifts the 80% accuracy point from 4-8m to 1m as compared to solvers that do not use the floor plan information. We are able to detect and remove NLOS signals with 91.5% accuracy.

In this paper, we introduce Pulsar, a wireless time transfer platform that can achieve clock synchronization to better than five nanosecond between indoor or GPS-denied devices. Nanosecond-level clock synchronization is a missing capability for many real-time applications like next-generation wireless systems that leverage spatial multiplexing to improve channel capacity and provide services like time-of-flight localization. With fine-grained synchronization, both clock stability and propagation delays introduce significant sources of error. Pulsar leverages a stable clock source derived from a Chip-Scale Atomic Clock (CSAC) along with an Ultra-WideBand (UWB) radio able to perform sub-nanosecond packet timestamping to estimate and correct for clock offsets. We design and evaluate a proof-of-concept network-wide synchronization protocol for Pulsar that selects low-jitter links to both estimate the location of nodes and reduce cumulative synchronization error across multiple hops. The Pulsar platform and protocol together provide a phase synchronized one pulse per second (1PPS) signal and 10 MHz reference clock that can be easily integrated with typical enduser applications like software-defined radios and communication systems. We experimentally evaluate the Pulsar platform in terms of clock synchronization accuracy, Allan deviation between pairwise clocks and ranging accuracy to show a clock synchronization of better than five nanoseconds per hop with an average of 2.12 ns and a standard deviation of 0.84 ns. The platform is able to identify and avoid clock error in cases where there is heavy multi-path or non-Line-of-Sight signals.

In this paper, we present the design and evaluation of a platform that can be used for time synchronization and indoor positioning of mobile devices. The platform uses the Time-Difference-Of-Arrival (TDOA) of multiple ultrasonic chirps broadcast from a network of beacons placed throughout the environment to find an initial location as well as synchronize a receiver's clock with the infrastructure. These chirps encode identification data and ranging information that can be used to compute the receiver's location. Once the clocks have been synchronized, the system can continue performing localization directly using Time-of-Flight (TOF) ranging as opposed to TDOA. This provides similar position accuracy with fewer beacons (for tens of minutes) until the mobile device clock drifts enough that a TDOA signal is once again required. Our hardware platform uses RF-based time synchronization to distribute clock synchronization from a subset of infrastructure beacons connected to a GPS source. Mobile devices use a novel time synchronization technique leverages the continuously free-running audio sampling subsystem of a smartphone to synchronize with global time. Once synchronized, each device can determine an accurate proximity from as little as one beacon using TOF measurements. This significantly decreases the number of beacons required to cover an indoor space and improves performance in the face of obstructions. We show through experiments that this approach outperforms the Network Time Protocol (NTP) on smartphones by an order of magnitude, providing an average 720μs synchronization accuracy with clock drift rates as low as 2ppm.

The proliferation of Bluetooth Low-Energy (BLE) chipsets on mobile devices has lead to a wide variety of user-installable tags and beacons designed for location-aware applications. In this paper, we present the Acoustic Location Processing System (ALPS), a platform that augments BLE transmitters with ultrasound in a manner that improves ranging accuracy and can help users configure indoor localization systems with minimal effort. A user places three or more beacons in an environment and then walks through a calibration sequence with their mobile device where they touch key points in the environment like the floor and the corners of the room. This process automatically computes the room geometry as well as the precise beacon locations without needing auxiliary measurements. Once configured, the system can track a user's location referenced to a map.

We demonstrate the Acoustic Location Processing System (ALPS), a platform that augments BLE proximity beacons with ultrasonic transmitters in a manner that allows for precise and robust indoor localization. {\em ALPS} uses Time-Difference-Of-Arrival (TDOA) and Time-Of-Flight (TOF) ranging to accurately localize mobile devices such as off-the-shelf smartphones and tablets in 2D space. Users inside the demo area will be able to determine their location and can directly plot it relatively to a map of the area using our app on a smartphone. Once a receiving device has determined its initial position, it can synchronize its audio clock with the transmission infrastructure to perform TOF-based localization, which provides similar position accuracy to TDOA based localization with fewer beacons. Multilateration and trilateration processing for each device's location is offloaded onto a cloud-based solver that can provide localization as a service to ALPS and similar TOF/TDOA based systems.

In this paper, we present an indoor ultrasonic location tracking system that can utilize off-the-shelf audio speakers (potentially already in place) to provide fine-grained indoor position data to modern mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. We design and evaluate a communication primitive based on rate-adaptive wide-band linear frequency modulated chirp pulses that utilizes the audio bandwidth just above the human hearing frequency range where mobile devices are still sensitive. Typically transmitting data, even outside of this range, introduces broadband human audible noises (clicks) due to the non-ideal impulse response of speakers. Unlike existing audio modulation schemes, our scheme is optimized based on psychoacoustic properties. For example, all tones exhibit slowly changing power-levels and gradual frequency changes so as to minimize human perceivable artifacts. Chirps also bring the benefit of Pulse Compression, which greatly improves ranging resolution and makes them resilient to both Doppler shifts as well as multi-path propagation that typically plague indoor environments. The scheme also supports the decoding of multiple unique identifier packets being transmitted simultaneously. By applying a Time-Difference-of-Arrival (TDOA) pseudo-ranging technique the mobile devices can localize themselves without tight out-of-band synchronization with the broadcasting infrastructure. This design is not only scalable with respect to the number of transmitters and tracked devices, but also improves user privacy since the mobile devices compute their positions locally. We show through user studies and experimentation on smartphones that we are able to provide sub-meter (95% < 10cm) accurate indoor positioning in a manner that is imperceptible to humans.

In this demonstration, we show an indoor location tracking system that broadcasts ranging data to mobile phones using ultrasonic signals. The system capitalizes on the ability for many smart-phones to detect audio above the human hearing range. This approach provides enhanced ranging capabilities to mobile devices without adding to or modifying their hardware. In [1], we describe a modulation scheme based on rate-adaptive wide-band linear frequency modulated chirp pulses that can be transmitted from standard audio tweeters at just above the human hearing frequency range. Acoustic data transmissions (even outside of the human hearing range), typically introduce audible noises (clicks) due to the non-ideal impulse response of speakers. Our scheme is optimized to avoid these artifacts by using slowly changing power-levels and gradual shifts in frequency. Each speaker simultaneously transmits a uniquely identifiably signature that can be geolocated on a map. By then applying a time-difference-of-arrival (TDOA) pseudo-ranging technique the mobile devices can localize themselves without synchronizing with the broadcasting infrastructure. This design is not only scalable with respect to the number of transmitters and tracked devices, but also improves user privacy since the mobile device can compute its position locally.