DOI

https://doi.org/10.25772/JFZQ-8996

Defense Date

2017

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science

Department

Engineering

First Advisor

Ruixin Niu

Second Advisor

Wei Cheng

Abstract

ACCURATE ACOUSTIC RANGING SYSTEM USING ANDROID SMARTPHONES

By Mohammadbagher Fotouhi, Master of Science

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science at Virginia Commonwealth University

Virginia Commonwealth University 2017

Major Director: Dr. Ruixin Niu, Associate Professor of Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

In this thesis, we present the design, implementation, and evaluation of an android ranging system, a high-accuracy acoustic-based ranging system which allows two android mobile phones to learn their physical distance from each other.

In this system we propose a practical solution for accurate ranging based on acoustic communication between speakers and microphones on two smartphones. Using the audible-band acoustic signal with the Wi-Fi assistance without the sound disturbance is promising for large deployment. Our method is a pure software-based solution and uses only the most basic set of commodity hardware: a speaker, a microphone, and Wi-Fi communication. So it is readily applicable to many commercial-off-the-shelf mobile devices like cell phones.

Our system is the result of several design goals, including user privacy, decentralized administration, and low cost. Rather than relying on any centralized management which tracks the user’s location to help them find their distance, our system helps devices learn their distance from each other without advertising their location information with any centralized management.

Compared to alternatives that require special-purpose hardware or pre-existence of precision location infrastructure , our system is applicable on most of off-the-shelf components so it is a commodity-based solution will obviously have wider applications and is cost effective.

Currently, two smartphones are used to estimate the distance between them through Wi-Fi and audio communications. The basic idea is estimating the distance between two phones by estimating the traveling time of audio signal from one phone to the other as the speed of sound is known. The preliminary results of ranging demonstrate that our algorithm could achieve high accuracy, and stable and reliable results for real time smartphone-based indoor ranging.

Rights

© The Author

Is Part Of

VCU University Archives

Is Part Of

VCU Theses and Dissertations

Date of Submission

8-14-2017

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