Increasing Accuracy of Location Determination : Exploiting Phase Change Reconstruction and Timing Measurements

Abstract: The thesis deals with improving location determination when using time of flight of radio signals to determine the location of a radiator. The goal of this project is to enhance an existing wireless data access point to perform an accurate measurement of the time of arrival of a data signal from a transmitter, and to combine this information with information from additional wireless data access points to determine the location of the transmitter. There have been a number of earlier efforts in indoor location determination system using different technologies. Many of which used signal strength analysis and they have low tolerance to moving obstacles such as humans, which frequently are the most usual dynamic obstacles in indoors. In this thesis, the proposed solution utilizes time stamping and sample correlation to utilize properties of the signal waveform, which has not previously been examined by researchers other than the examiner and advisor. The main contribution of the project is a detailed analysis and design of a solution, as well as a comparison with other potential solutions. The main purpose of this solution is to increase the timing accuracy to below the duration of a single symbol. The wireless device that has been analyzed implements the IEEE 802.11b protocol. Several investigations have been done to determine the best way of extracting information from the 802.11b data frame and symbol sequence; here we utilize a correlator to determine the time of arrival of a specific sequence of symbols in a data frame. The time stamping of a stream of samples has been implemented in an Altera FPGA to get a deterministic computation time. Instead of decoding the incoming I&Q signals and mapping them to bits, the correlator is used to detect the unique sequence containing PSK encoded and Barker code spread scrambled ones , as this sequence always appears at the start of each data frame. The advantage of this approach is that using of samples of the waveform instead of bits gives a significant enhancement in timing resolution. The design documents of this work include detailed descriptions, simulations, and plots. A number of simulations have been done to show the timing accuracy and standard deviation, as well as comparisons with several different approaches. Several potential optimizations have also been discussed in the report. Simulation code for MATLAB and implementation code for the FPGA has been included in appendices in the end of this thesis.