FTM-Broadcast: Efficient Network-wide Ranging
Résumé
Indoor geolocation has witnessed a significant advancement through the refinement of the 802.11 FTM (Fine Timing Measurement) protocol. Accurate indoor geolocation has numerous applications in areas such as asset tracking, indoor navigation, and location-based services. The standard 802.11 FTM protocol enables accurate indoor positioning by measuring the time-of-flight between a mobile device and multiple access points (APs). It can be generalized to device-to-device ranging. However, the conventional implementation of FTM suffers from increased complexity as the number of devices grows, limiting its scalability. FTM indeed involves a point-to-point exchange of messages between each pair of devices, leading to a quadratic increase in the number of messages as the number of neighboring devices increases. In this article, a breakthrough method is proposed to enhance the FTM protocol by leveraging broadcast communication, resulting in a substantial reduction in message complexity from quadratic to linear. By taking into account broadcast in the protocol, our approach eliminates the need for multiple individual exchanges and devises a mechanism where a single message from the mobile device is broadcasted to all neighbors simultaneously. Each message exchanged will then be useful for computing every pairwise time-of-flight, by piggybacking all timestamps, making the protocol more efficient and scalable. We conducted extensive simulated experiments to evaluate the performance of the enhanced FTM protocol. The results demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method, showcasing a substantial reduction in computational overhead compared to the conventional FTM implementation.
Origine | Fichiers produits par l'(les) auteur(s) |
---|