Joint Positioning-Communications System Design: Leveraging Phase-Accurate Time-of-Flight Estimation and Distributed Coherence

Limited spectral access motivates technologies that adapt to diminishing resources and increasingly cluttered environments. We design and implement a joint positioning-communications system that enables simultaneous positioning of, and communications between, nodes in a distributed network of base-stations and unmanned aerial systems (UASs). This system design achieves high precision position estimates with fewer spectral resources than similar technologies, while simultaneously enabling orientation estimation and network communications. These capabilities are enabled by developing advanced time-of-arrival (ToA) estimators and a phase-accurate distributed coherence algorithm.