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Slocalization: Sub-{\mu}W Ultra Wideband Backscatter Localization.

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Authors
Pat Pannuto, Benjamin Kempke, Prabal Dutta

Ultra wideband technology has shown great promise for providing high-qualitylocation estimation, even in complex indoor multipath environments, butexisting ultra wideband systems require tens to hundreds of milliwatts duringoperation. Backscatter communication has demonstrated the viability ofastonishingly low-power tags, but has thus far been restricted to narrowbandsystems with low localization resolution. The challenge to combining thesecomplimentary technologies is that they share a compounding limitation,constrained transmit power. Regulations limit ultra wideband transmissions tojust -41.3 dBm/MHz, and a backscatter device can only reflect the power itreceives. The solution is long-term integration of this limited power, liftingthe initially imperceptible signal out of the noise. This integration onlyworks while the target is stationary. However, stationary describes the vastmajority of objects, especially lost ones. With this insight, we designSlocalization, a sub-microwatt, decimeter-accurate localization system thatopens a new tradeoff space in localization systems and realizes an energy,size, and cost point that invites the localization of every thing. To evaluatethis concept, we implement an energy-harvesting Slocalization tag and find thatSlocalization can recover ultra wideband backscatter in under fifteen minutesacross thirty meters of space and localize tags with a mean 3D Euclidean errorof only 30 cm.

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