Multiuser Simultaneous Two-Way Ranging

Abstract

Location awareness will be crucial for many future wireless network applications, such as the Internet of Things and vehicular networks. Existing localization works typically propose sequential signaling schemes, where one pair of nodes communicates to range their distance at a time. This implies high ranging overhead for large networks, where many nodes are within range of each node. In this paper, a novel scheme is proposed which takes merely two frames of transmissions. In the first frame, all nodes transmit their respective signatures. In the second frame, all nodes basically repeat what they have received in the first frame multiplied by a scrambling sequence (assuming full duplexing). By the end of the second frame, every node can estimate not only its distance to all nodes within range, but also the distances between neighboring nodes which are within range of each other. It is shown that in a half-duplex setting the scheme can still be utilized to perform two-way ranging. Successive interference cancellation can also be leveraged with the scheme in order to improve performance for subsequent estimates in interference heavy scenarios. The proposed scheme is highly scalable, and is validated using simulation.