Synchronized Uplink Time of Arrival Localization: A Measurement-driven Evaluation

We study terrestrial wireless uplink Time of Arrival (ToA) localization systems where multiple infrastructure nodes measure the ToA from the signal transmitted by a user of interest. The measured ToA is shared with a centralized server that then computes the location of the device. While the fundamental issues such as accurate synchronization and accurate location of nodes concerning precise location estimation have been addressed elsewhere, we mainly focus on improving the efficiency of ToA estimation in this work. Using our proposed methodology, a 30 fold improvement in the computational efficiency at no cost of localization accuracy was observed which in practice enables the localization network to track and coordinate many more simultaneous users frequently. We validated our ToA estimates on the over-the-air measurements taken from our on-campus localization network and obtained sub-meter accuracy, indicating that our solution is competitive with conventional high overhead ToA methods.