Real-time indoor localization with TDOA and distributed software defined radio: demonstration abstract

We present a system utilizing off-the-shelf hardware components and a software framework, which is able to perform radio frequency localization with high accuracy in the order of a few meters. The architecture consists of highly synchronized receivers that are utilized by a distributed software defined radio stack in order to obtain synchronized multi channel reception of the target signal. This includes transportation of the sampled baseband signals from the receivers over a backbone network and local signal processing at a fusion center. To overcome the large drifts in the synchronization signals provided by GPS, we permanently calibrate the system based on a stationary reference source. The implemented system framework enables us to perform research on localization algorithms and performance evaluation under the influence of various inherent noise and error sources.