A D2D relative positioning system on smart devices

Smart devices have become essential in modern world. Nowadays, people conduct various social activities on smart devices, such as exchanging name cards, slides, or files. Traditionally, it would require URLs or flash drives to achieve this goal. However, these conventional means lack intuitive physical interaction and are sometimes hard to perform on smart devices, especially when people wish to interact with a target of physical meanings, e.g., “the man sitting on the opposite side of the table”. This paper proposes to integrate file sharing with localization of the target devices. A device-to-device (D2D) relative positioning method is introduced. The basic idea is to combine the orientations of devices with an acoustic ranging mechanism to determine their relative locations. The result allows users to drag files instinctively on their screens to destined receivers, and then release to initiate the file sharing in a network group. A prototype system is developed to verify the feasibility of our approach.