RFEye in the Sky
Maqsood Ahamed Abdul Careem, Jorge Gomez, Dola Saha, Aveek Dutta

TL;DR
RFEye is a UAV-based technique that localizes signals without waveform dependence by using asynchronous distributed beamforming and DoA estimation from uncoordinated positions, achieving meter-level accuracy in outdoor environments.
Contribution
The paper introduces RFEye, a novel UAV-based method for waveform-independent signal localization using a single antenna and distributed beamforming, with practical outdoor validation.
Findings
Median accuracy of 1.03m in 2D for Wi-Fi signals
Median accuracy of 2.5m in 3D for Wi-Fi signals
Robustness to wind and UAV position errors
Abstract
We introduce RFEye, a generalized technique to locate signals independent of the waveform, using a single Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) equipped with only one omnidirectional antenna. This is achieved by acquiring signals from uncoordinated positions within a sphere of 1-meter radius at two nearby locations and formulating an asynchronous, distributed receiver beamforming at the UAV to compute the Direction of Arrival (DoA) from the unknown transmitter. The proposed method includes four steps: 1) Blind detection and extraction of unique signature in the signal to be localized, 2) Asynchronous signal acquisition and conditioning, 3) DoA calculation by creating a virtual distributed antenna array at UAV and 4) Obtaining position fix of emitter using DoA from two locations. These steps are analyzed for various sources of error, computational complexity and compared with widely used signal…
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Taxonomy
TopicsRadio Wave Propagation Studies · Direction-of-Arrival Estimation Techniques · Antenna Design and Optimization
