Seirios: leveraging multiple channels for LoRaWAN indoor and outdoor localization

Localization is important for a large number of Internet of Things (IoT) endpoint devices connected by LoRaWAN. Due to the bandwidth limitations of LoRaWAN, existing localization methods without specialized hardware (e.g., GPS) produce poor performance. To increase the localization accuracy, we propose a super-resolution localization method, called Seirios, which features a novel algorithm to synchronize multiple non-overlapped communication channels by exploiting the unique features of the radio physical layer to increase the overall bandwidth. By exploiting both the original and the conjugate of the physical layer, Seirios can resolve the direct path from multiple reflectors in both indoor and outdoor environments. We design a Seirios prototype and evaluate its performance in an outdoor area of 100 m × 60 m, and an indoor area of 25 m × 15 m, which shows that Seirios can achieve a median error of 4.4 m outdoors (80% samples < 6.4 m), and 2.4 m indoors (80% samples < 6.1 m), respectively. The results show that Seirios produces 42% less localization error than the baseline approach. Our evaluation also shows that, different to previous studies in Wi-Fi localization systems that have wider bandwidth, time-of-fight (ToF) estimation is less effective for LoRaWAN localization systems with narrowband radio signals.