Location-based services have become extremely popular. As a result, indoor localization has received a lot of attention from both industry and academia. Despite the plethora of existing approaches, no method can achieve high accuracy without major, expensive changes to existing systems. For example, to achieve good accuracy, fingerprinting methods require many APs within range of a client, time-of-arrival methods require tight synchronization, client hardware changes and line-of-sight, and direction-of-arrival methods require expensive antenna front ends and line-of-sight. In this paper, we take advantage of inexpensive, off-the-shelf switched-beam antennas (SBAs) to increase the diversity of measurements used for fingerprint-based localization. We show using experiments that a single AP equipped with n SBAs may infer equally rich localization information as nAPs equipped with n omnidirectional antennas each, as long as the SBAs are properly configured. We then establish via extensive experiments that a single packet reception from a commodity client at a single AP equipped with a handful of SBAs (e.g., eight SBAs costing a couple of dollars more than omni antennas) achieves localization accuracy in the order of half a meter with or without line-of-sight, in any indoor environment, with zero airtime overhead and zero client support.

Modern wireless devices such as smartphones are pushing the demand for higher wireless data rates. The ensuing increase in wireless traffic demand can be met by a denser deployment of access points, coupled with a coordinated deployment of advanced physical layer techniques to reduce inter-cell interference. Unfortunately, advanced physical layer techniques, e.g., multi-user (MU) MIMO found in 802.11ac and LTE-advanced, are not designed to operate efficiently in a coordinated fashion across multiple densely deployed transmitters. In this paper, we introduce a new coordination architecture, which can achieve high performance gains without the high overhead and deployment cost that usually comes with coordination, thus making the vision of high capacity wireless access via densely deployed transmitters practical. The basic idea is to loosely coordinate nearby transmitters using slow varying channel statistics, while keeping all the functionality which depends on fast varying channel state information and has tight time deadlines locally. We achieve this via a smart combination of analog and digital beamforming using inexpensive front ends, a provably efficient algorithm to select compatible users and analog beams across all transmitters, and backward compatible protocol extensions. Our performance results, which include analysis, simulations, and experiments with software defined radios and directional antennas, show that our approach can achieve the $10\times $ gains of the theoretically optimal coordinated MU-MIMO approach, without the need to either tightly coordinate the clocks of the remote transmitters or meet tight delay constraints.

The demand for wireless bandwidth is rising to unprecedented levels. The industry has responded with the inclusion of advanced PHY techniques, most notably multi-user (MU) MIMO, in the most recent WiFi and LTE standards. However, despite the theoretical promise for large multiplexing gains, in practice the rate gains are modest due to a combination of large overhead to collect channel state information and not-so-well-conditioned channel matrices.