Dr. Zhenghao Zhang has a paper accepted at The 22nd ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys 2024) as the primary faculty author. SenSys is a flagship conference in Mobile Computing. The paper, titled “StarAngle: User Orientation Sensing with Beacon Phase Measurements of Multiple Starlink Satellites,” is authored by Dr. Zhenghao Zhang and his PhD student Mr. Raghav Rathi.
In this paper, a novel method, called StarAngle, is proposed to estimate user orientation with the beacon signals of Starlink satellites. StarAngle measures the beacon phase difference between two receiving antennas because the phase difference is a function of the user orientation. The phase measurements are compared with mathematical calculations based on known orbital parameters of Starlink satellites and the value that leads to the best agreement is used as the estimation. StarAngle is experimentally tested at 10 locations under challenging weather conditions and the results show that the median estimation error is 7.5 degrees. The results also confirm that the phase information of Starlink satellites can be measured reliably and may be used to support other applications in addition to user orientation estimation.
The paper will be presented at the SenSys conference in Hangzhou, China in December 2024.