SRAC: Simultaneous Ranging and Communication in UWB Networks

Ultra-wideband signals have been used for accurate ranging and localization application during the last few years. State of the art UWB ranging applications can estimate the distances with less than a 5 cm error. Existing localization solutions create their own ranging traffic. In this paper, we investigate the possibility of piggybacking the information required by ranging application over existing network traffic. In addition, we study the feasibility of piggybacking of sensing information over ranging traffic and finally, we propose our technique for Simultaneous Ranging and Communication (SRAC) in UWB networks which adaptively changes the ranging mode from active to passive by using either ranging traffic or sensing traffic to accomplish the ranging and sensing goals while reducing the network traffic to minimum possible. We integrated our proposed solution to RIOT operating system and evaluated its performance over a mesh of UWB-enabled nodes. Our results indicate almost 40% reduction in network traffic.