In the last years indoor localization and applications that use positioning information have attracted a lot of attention from the research community as well as the industry. The achieved accuracy of an indoor localization system is the key to enable certain applications, such as navigation. In a scenario where the system runs exclusively on commodity hardware such as smartphones and even without installing any mobile app in the mobile device, location information may be exploited not only for navigation, but also for the benefit of the network itself or for the investigation of physical behaviours.

In indoor areas, communication technologies such as Wireless Fidelity (WiFi) are gaining popularity due to the ever increasing availability and deployment of APs that can be used simultaneously as an infrastructure for networking and positioning. Despite being the most used technology for tracking devices in indoor environments, the research community has focused more intensively on approaches such as the Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) or combining WiFi signals with inertial sensors as found in smartphones. These approaches are error prone, dependent on frequent calibrations, or they require specialized hardware or the user must be interested to run a specific application designed to run on the smartphone.

Using only commodity WiFi chipsets, this thesis investigates location systems that are based on Time-of-Flight (ToF) echo technique, and do not require any calibration and user intervention, and it explores ranging and location data to improve network management and infer user behaviour.

About Maurizio Rea

In 2011, Maurizio obtained his B.Sc. in Telecommunications Engineering from the University of Palermo (Palermo, Italy). In 2015, he received his M.Sc. in Telecommunications Engineering from the same University.

After his master thesis, he worked at ETH in Zurich as a Researcher. The goal of this research was the improvement of a localization system, based on the time of flight, to confront it with other localization systems in different competition.

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The thesis defense will be conducted in English. Given the coronavirus crisis, the thesis defense will be online

PhD Thesis Advisor: Dr. Domenico Giustiniano, IMDEA Networks Institute, Madrid, Spain

University: University Carlos III of Madrid, Spain

Doctoral Program: Telematics Engineering

PhD Committee members:

• President: Dr. Albert Banchs, IMDEA Networks Institute, Madrid, Spain.
• Secretary: Dr. Francesco Gringoli, Associate Professor at University of Brescia, Italy.
• Panel members: Dr. David Malone, Associate Professor (Senior Lecturer) at Maynooth University, Ireland.