Wi-Fi Ranging under Interference
Anatolij Zubow, Christos Laskos, Sascha Rösler, Gerhard Wunder, Falko Dressler · 2025
The next generation of WiFi aims to deliver highly accurate location estimation through time-of-flight measurements. While initial results show promising performance, there is a lack of studies conducted under realistic, congested network conditions with significant cross-technology and co-channel interference. In this paper, we demonstrate that time of arrival (ToA)-based ranging, utilizing the MUSIC super-resolution algorithm, is severely impacted by interference. This is due to the fact that the channel state information (CSI) obtained in the presence of interference includes not only the characteristics of the channel but also the interference itself. This corrupted CSI leads to persistent ToA errors. Simulation results indicate that these errors are particularly pronounced in indoor scenarios with multipath propagation resulting in a ranging error of up-to 3 m which can only be mitigated by the usage of wider channels, e.g., 160 MHz, for ranging.