Can You See Me? The Use of a Binary Visibility Metric in Distance Bounding

Abstract

Wireless networks are becoming more and more commonplace, with ubiquitous computing flourishing in this ever expanding environment. As this occurs, the demand for a reliable method of locating devices has also increased dramatically. Locating devices with no a prioi knowledge is a very large problem, requiring much special equipment. Instead, we focus on the issue of location verification, a smaller aspect of the location issue. Distance bounding is a well respected technique used in this area, however it relies on precise calculations to locate a device. We propose a method of locating a device which does not rely on these calculations. Instead, we employ a binary “yes/no” visibility metric, where neighbouring devices indicate whether they can “see” or communicate directly with the claiming device. We confirm the existence of a direct link through excluding the possibility of a proxied connection being employed. The intersection of the ranges of these devices can then be used to extract a location area, without relying on calculating exact distances through precise timings.