FREDI: Robust RSS-based ranging with multipath effect and radio interference

Radio Signal Strength (RSS) based ranging is attractive by the low cost and easy deployment. In real environments, its accuracy is severely affected by the multipath effect and the external radio interference. The well-known fingerprint approaches can deal with the issues but introduce too much overhead in dynamic environments. In this paper, we attempt to address the issue along a completely different direction. We propose a new ranging framework called Fredi that exploits the frequency diversity to overcome the multi-path effect solely based on RSS measurements. We design a Discrete Fourier Transformation based algorithm and prove that it has the optimal solution under ideal cases. We further revise the algorithm to be robust to the measurement noises in practice. We implement Fredi on top of the USRP-2 platform and conduct extensive real environments in indoor environments. Experimental results show the superiority performance compared with the traditional methods.