Filtering Noisy 802.11 Time-of-Flight Ranging Measurements

Abstract

Time-of-Flight (ToF) echo techniques have been proposed as a way to estimate the range between regular Wi-Fi stations. Recent works either did not address practical questions for deployability, or made evaluations in basic setups, or used advanced 802.11 hardware designs. We build an approach solely deployed using ToF measurements and relying on software access point (AP) upgrades of simple commercial off-the-shelf 802.11 chipsets. Our solution filters noisy measurements collected by WiFi chipsets of six dollars each, it has been tested across different and heterogeneous setups and testbeds, and has the potential to enable ToF ranging in every Wi-Fi chipsets.