Towards Accurate Acoustic Localization on a Smartphone

Since our daily activities are dominantly indoor, as smartphones emerge as the most popular personal computing companions, major IT companies recently launched aggressive investment on mobile indoor location services and positioning systems, e. g., on iOS or Android mobile devices. However, one major hurdle has not been conquered yet: smartphone-based high-resolution indoor localization. In this paper, we propose a practical solution for accurate ranging and localization based on acoustic communication between anchor nodes with speakers and the microphone on a smartphone. To identify different anchor nodes and enable time-of-arrival (TOA) ranging, we propose approaches for signal modulation, symbol detection and demodulation, synchronization and ranging. Experimental results show that the communication bit-error-rate and ranging accuracy is sufficient for our target applications. The preliminary results of localization demonstrate that our algorithm could achieve high-accuracy of 23cm in the offline mode with a promising potential for realtime smartphone-based indoor localization.