SigCan: Toward Reliable ToF Estimation Leveraging Multipath Signal Cancellation on Commodity WiFi Devices

Yang Li, Dan Wu, Jiahe Chen, Weiyan Shi, Leye Wang, Lu Su, Wenwei Li, Daqing Zhang

Abstract: The widespread deployment of WiFi infrastructure has facilitated the development of Time-of-Flight (ToF) based sensing applications. ToF estimation, however, is a challenging task due to the complexity of multipath effect. In this paper, we propose a phase difference based method for ToF estimation and uncover the potential of signal cancellation to mitigate the impact of multipath and noise on phase differences among subcarriers. To separate the moving target path from the complex multipath for ToF estimation, we suggest employing specific elimination methods tailored to the characteristics of different signal components. For dynamic multipath, we observe that when a given subcarrier propagates along two paths to the receiver, with path lengths differing by half a wavelength, the phase difference introduced by these two paths cancels each other out. Therefore, we propose two metrics to identify signals that satisfy this condition, utilizing both frequency diversity and spatial diversity. Additionally, we propose leveraging time diversity to eliminate the static multipath component and reduce the impact of noise. We implemented the methods with off-the-shelf WiFi devices and achieved mean errors of 15.36 cm and 21.05 cm for distance estimation in outdoor and indoor scenarios, outperforming state-of-the-art ToF estimation method by 50% error reduction.