Oblivious Node Localisation from Reception Timestamps in Asynchronous Networks

Time: July 10, 2017, h. 10:30 am 
Location: Room Garda, Polo scientifico e tecnologico "Fabio Ferrari", Building Povo 1, via Sommarive 5, Povo (Trento)

Speaker 

Francesco Gringoli, University of Brescia

Abstract

Without GPS support, localisation of mobile targets in indoor scenarios becomes a tricky task. To avoid the deployment of dedicated hardware infrastructure, we developed a technique that exploits signals transmitted in a 802.11 network to opportunistically determine the position of oblivious targets. The proposed technique relies exclusively on the reception timestamps collected by anchor nodes and does not require any form of time synchronisation as we eliminate clock skews by means of data processing, leveraging the data redundancy that is intrinsic to the multiple reception of the same packet at different anchors. We validate the proposed method in different experimental settings, indoor and outdoor, using exclusively low-cost Commercial-Off-The-Shelf WiFi devices, achieving sub-meter accuracy in full Line-of-Sight conditions and meter-level accuracy in mild Non-line-of-sight environment. We finally show how we can further improve the accuracy by exploiting Channel State Information.

About the speaker

Francesco Gringoli has been Assistant Professor of Telecommunications at the Dept. of Information Engineering of the University of Brescia, Italy since 2005. His current research interests include performance evaluation and medium access control in Wireless LANs, statistical classification of network traffic, and high-speed packet inspection. In wireless networking, he gained public attention in 2009 when he developed OpenFWWF which allowed many researchers throughout the world to deploy for the first time large testbed of inexpensive prototypes.
Since then he counts a great number of collaborations with Universities (including University of Oxford, University of Edinburgh, UPF, IMDEA Networks Institute, TU Darmstadt) and the industry (including Alcatel Lucent, ZyXEL, Juniper, Adant Tech) which also funded his research. He has been actively participating to FP7 and H2020 European projects, and he got several distinctions.

Contact person regarding this talk: Renato Lo Cigno, locigno [at] disi.unitn.it