Acoustic Ranging and Communication via Microphone Channel

Absolute GPS co-ordinates are typically inaccessible indoor. Pervasive smartphones offer new opportunities for relative indoor localization. The low-complexity and high-accuracy ranging under the communication-link is a crucial requirement for enabling location sensing in indoor environments. In this paper, the authors propose a Time-of-Arrival (TOA) estimation and communication scheme utilizing the ubiquitous speaker/microphone pair to achieve accurate ranging. To compensate for the performance loss caused by this simple device, an optimized TOA estimation method is proposed for enhanced ranging reliability and accuracy.