BeepBeep: A High Accuracy Acoustic Ranging System using COTS Mobile Devices

We present the design, implementation, and evaluation of BeepBeep, a high-accuracy acoustic-based ranging system. It operates in a spontaneous, ad-hoc, and device-to-device context without leveraging any pre-planned infrastructure. It is a pure software-based solution and uses only the most basic set of commodity hardware — a speaker, a microphone, and some form of device-to-device communication — so that it is readily applicable to many low-cost sensor platforms and to most commercial-off-the-shelf mobile devices like cell phones and PDAs. It achieves high accuracy through a combination of three techniques: two-way sensing, self-recording, and sample counting. The basic idea is the following. To estimate the range between two devices, each will emit a specially-designed sound signal (“Beep”) and collect a simultaneous recording from its microphone. Each recording should contain two such beeps, one from its own speaker and the other from its peer. By counting the number of samples between these two beeps and exchanging the time duration information with its peer, each device can derive the two-way time of flight of the beeps at the granularity of sound sampling rate. This technique cleverly avoids many sources of inaccuracy found in other typical time-of-arrival schemes, such as clock synchronization, non-real-time handling, software delays, etc. Our experiments on two common cell phone models have shown that we can achieve around one or two centimeters accuracy within a range of more than ten meters, despite a series of technical challenges in implementing the idea.