The very large bandwidth available in the 60 GHz band allows, in principle, to design highly accurate positioning systems. Integrating such systems with standard protocols (e.g., IEEE 802.11ad) is crucial for the deployment of location-based services, but it is also challenging and limits the design choices. Another key problem is that consumer-grade 60 GHz hardware only provides coarse channel state information, and has highly irregular beam shapes due to its cost-efficient design.

In this paper, we explore the location accuracy that can be achieved using such hardware, without modifying the 802.11ad standard. We consider a typical 802.11ad indoor network with multiple access points (APs). Each AP collects the coarse signal-to-noise ratio of the directional beacons that clients transmit periodically. Given the irregular beam shapes, the challenge is to relate each beacon to a set of transmission angles that allows to triangulate a user. We design a location system based on particle filters along with linear programming and Fourier analysis. We implement and evaluate our algorithm on commercial off-the-shelf 802.11ad hardware in an office scenario with mobile human blockage. Despite the strong limitations of the hardware, our system operates in real-time and achieves sub-meter accuracy in 70% of the cases.

About Guillermo Bielsa

Guillermo Bielsa is currently a Research Assistant at IMDEA Networks in Madrid, Spain. He is also with Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M), where he is enrolled as a PhD student. He obtained both his bachelor’s degree in Communication System Engineering and his master`s degree in Multimedia and Communications from UC3M in 2015 and 2016, respectively.

Having a great interest in the Wireless Comunications field, he is working in the research of millimeter-wave communications, in the 60 Ghz band where he is studying its behavior and developing algorithms to improve its performance.

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