Anteumbler: Non-Invasive Antenna Orientation Error Measurement for WiFi APs

TL;DR

Anteumbler is a novel non-invasive method that accurately measures WiFi antenna orientations, significantly improving localization accuracy and robustness in various environments by reducing orientation errors.

Contribution

It introduces a new spatial angle model and an iterative algorithm to efficiently and accurately measure antenna orientations without prior knowledge or extensive sampling.

Findings

Median orientation error below 6 degrees

Reduces antenna separation error by 10 mm in LocAP

Improves user localization accuracy by over 1 meter in SpotFi

Abstract

The performance of WiFi-based localization systems is affected by the spatial accuracy of WiFi AP. Compared with the imprecision of AP location and antenna separation, the imprecision of AP's or antenna's orientation is more important in real scenarios, including AP rotation and antenna irregular tilt. In this paper, we propose Anteumbler that non-invasively, accurately and efficiently measures the orientation of each antenna in physical space. Based on the fact that the received power is maximized when a Tx-Rx antenna pair is perfectly aligned, we construct a spatial angle model that can obtain the antennas' orientations without prior knowledge. However, the sampling points of traversing the spatial angle need to cover the entire space. We use the orthogonality of antenna directivity and polarization and adopt an iterative algorithm to reduce the sampling points by hundreds of times, which greatly improves the efficiency. To achieve the required antenna orientation accuracy, we eliminate the influence of propagation distance using a dual plane intersection model and filter out ambient noise. Our real-world experiments with six antenna types, two antenna layouts and two antenna separations show that Anteumbler achieves median errors below 6 degree for both elevation and azimuth angles, and is robust to NLoS and dynamic environments. Last but not least, for the reverse localization system, we deploy Anteumbler over LocAP and reduce the antenna separation error by 10 mm, while for the user localization system, we deploy Anteumbler over SpotFi and reduce the user localization error by more than 1 m.