WULoc: Achieving Extremely Long-range High-precision Localization via Wi-Fi-UWB Connection

Wireless localization, especially using ubiquitous Wi-Fi devices, has been studied for decades. However, due to complex signal propagation, resolving multiple reflected paths and further achieving accurate localization face great challenges in the localization precision and localization range, which are caused by the limited bandwidth and sensitivity of Wi-Fi signals respectively. Straightforwardly solving these challenges by employing wide bandwidth Wi-Fi is only helpful for improving precision, while the localization range is still short due to Wi-Fi's intrinsic vulnerability to SNR drop. This paper presents Wi-Fi-UWB Localization (WULoc) to achieve both precise and long-range localization for Wi-Fi devices. Specifically, WULoc leverages the picosecond level timestamp information that is extracted from the links of the Wi-Fi device to multiple UWB anchors, innovatively created by the proposed Wi-Fi-UWB connection establishment, which overcomes the incompatibility between Wi-Fi and UWB physical layers. WULoc further calculates the TDoA of Wi-Fi-UWB links, from which the location of the Wi-Fi device is estimated. Extensive experiments show that WULoc locates a Wi-Fi device at a range of 240 meters with a precision of 5.3 meters.