Time Difference of Arrival Localization Testbed: Development, Calibration, and Automation

Abstract

As congested RF environments become increasingly prevalent, understanding and learning how to manage them becomes more important. Particular applications including localization must be tolerant to high levels of interference that are common in such settings. In order to study such RF environments with Extreme Emitter Densities (EED), RF Sensor Nodes (RFSNs) have been deployed in Bobby Dodd football stadium at the Georgia Institute of Technology, as well as a corresponding laboratory testbed. A control center was established for the automated coordination and management of the nodes, enabling the recording of RF spectrum and associated metadata. GNU Radio is used to calibrate the nodes, analyze the data, and deploy Time Difference
of Arrival localization algorithms as well as improve spectrum utilization. This paper discusses the hardware setup deployed in these testbeds, the networked management of the nodes, and an initial mechanism for time synchronization.