Isochrons in Photonic Oscillators: A Paradigm Shift in Positioning

High-accuracy localization has attracted significant research interest for decades. Recent use cases such as Augmented and Virtual Reality (AR/VR) applications have renewed demand for localization with sub-centimeter resolution. Here, we propose iPos: Isochrons in Photonic Oscillators for Positioning, a highly accurate three-dimensional (3D) localization system leveraging isochrons in tunable photonic oscillators. To that end, we exploit the well-known capabilities of tunable photonic oscillators and recent results on their isochrons' structure to introduce an innovative mechanism for measuring Time of Arrival (ToA). The proposed timing mechanism measures the ToA of the incoming user signal leveraging the phase shifts of photonic oscillators based on their phase response, which is uniquely determined by their isochrons' structure. Furthermore, iPos employs the photonic injection locking technique and the nonlinear properties of the photonic oscillators to achieve highly accurate phase synchronization among different positioning nodes. Our numerical results indicate that iPos achieves cm-level accuracy in three- dimensional localization. This accuracy is at least an order of magnitude higher compared to existing positioning systems, owing to the proposed photonic timing mechanism, which offers high-resolution ToA measurements that translate to highly accurate distance information, further enhanced by seamless synchronization achieved through injection-locking techniques.