Space-partitioning with cascade-connected ANN structures for positioning in mobile communication systems

The world around us is getting more connected with each day passing by – new portable devices employing wireless connections to various networks wherever one might be. Locationaware computing has become an important bit of telecommunication services and industry. For this reason, the research efforts on new and improved localisation algorithms are constantly being performed. Thus far, the satellite positioning systems have achieved highest popularity and penetration regarding the global position estimation. In spite the numerous investigations aimed at enabling these systems to equally procure the position in both indoor and outdoor environments, this is still a task to be completed. This research work presented herein aimed at improving the state-of-the-art positioning techniques through the use of two highly popular mobile communication systems: WLAN and public land mobile networks. These systems already have widely deployed network structures (coverage) and a vast number of (inexpensive) mobile clients, so using them for additional, positioning purposes is rational and logical. First, the positioning in WLAN systems was analysed and elaborated. The indoor test-bed, used for verifying the models’ performances, covered almost 10,000m2 area. It has been chosen carefully so that the positioning could be thoroughly explored. The measurement campaigns performed therein covered the whole of test-bed environment and gave insight into location dependent parameters available in WLAN networks. Further analysis of the data lead to developing of positioning models based on ANNs. The best single ANN model obtained 9.26m average distance error and 7.75m median distance error. The novel positioning model structure, consisting of cascade-connected ANNs, improved those results to 8.14m and 4.57m, respectively. To adequately compare the proposed techniques with other, well-known research techniques, the environment positioning error parameter was introduced. This parameter enables to take the size of the test environment into account when comparing the accuracy of the indoor positioning techniques. Concerning the PLMN positioning, in-depth analysis of available system parameters and signalling protocols produced a positioning algorithm, capable of fusing the system received signal strength parameters received from multiple systems and multiple operators. Knowing that most of the areas are covered by signals from more than one network operator and even more than one system from one operator, it becomes easy to note the great practical value of this novel algorithm. On the other hand, an extensive drive-test measurement campaign, covering more than 600km in the central areas of Belgrade, was performed. Using this algorithm and applying the single ANN models to the recorded measurements, a 59m average distance error and 50m median distance error were obtained. Moreover, the positioning in indoor environment was verified and the degradation of performances, due to the crossenvironment model use, was reported: 105m average distance error and 101m median distance error. When applying the new, cascade-connected ANN structure model, distance errors were reduced to 26m and 2m, for the average and median distance errors, respectively. The obtained positioning accuracy was shown to be good enough for the implementation of a broad scope of location based services by using the existing and deployed, commonly available, infrastructure

Positioning in Indoor Mobile Systems

Non

Radio Communications

In the last decades the restless evolution of information and communication technologies (ICT) brought to a deep transformation of our habits. The growth of the Internet and the advances in hardware and software implementations modified our way to communicate and to share information. In this book, an overview of the major issues faced today by researchers in the field of radio communications is given through 35 high quality chapters written by specialists working in universities and research centers all over the world. Various aspects will be deeply discussed: channel modeling, beamforming, multiple antennas, cooperative networks, opportunistic scheduling, advanced admission control, handover management, systems performance assessment, routing issues in mobility conditions, localization, web security. Advanced techniques for the radio resource management will be discussed both in single and multiple radio technologies; either in infrastructure, mesh or ad hoc networks

Mobile user positioning in public land mobile networks by using methods based on support vector machines.

Tokom prethodnih godina, potreba za podrškom sve većeg broja LBS (Location Based Services) servisa dovela je do intezivnog razvoja tehnika za pozicioniranje mobilnih korisnika (objekata) u radio sistemima. Pri tom, zahtevi koje sistemi za pozicioniranje treba da ispune, prvenstveno po pitanju tačnosti, ali i po pitanju kašnjenja, dostupnosti servisa, kompleksnosti i cene implementacije, postaju sve strožiji...Over the last years, the necessity of providing the support for various Location Based Services (LBS) has led to the intensive development of the techniques for mobile user (objects) positioning in radio systems. At the same time, the requirements that need to be fulfilled by the positioning technique in terms of accuracy, latency, availability, complexity and implementation costs, are getting higher..

Contributions to Positioning Methods on Low-Cost Devices

Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) receivers are common in modern consumer devices that make use of position information, e.g., smartphones and personal navigation assistants. With a GNSS receiver, a position solution with an accuracy in the order of five meters is usually available if the reception conditions are benign, but the performance degrades rapidly in less favorable environments and, on the other hand, a better accuracy would be beneficial in some applications. This thesis studies advanced methods for processing the measurements of low-cost devices that can be used for improving the positioning performance. The focus is on GNSS receivers and microelectromechanical (MEMS) inertial sensors which have become common in mobile devices such as smartphones. First, methods to compensate for the additive bias of a MEMS gyroscope are investigated. Both physical slewing of the sensor and mathematical modeling of the bias instability process are considered. The use of MEMS inertial sensors for pedestrian navigation indoors is studied in the context of map matching using a particle filter. A high-sensitivity GNSS receiver is used to produce coarse initialization information for the filter to decrease the computational burden without the need to exploit local building infrastructure. Finally, a cycle slip detection scheme for stand-alone single-frequency GNSS receivers is proposed. Experimental results show that even a MEMS gyroscope can reach an accuracy suitable for North seeking if the measurement errors are carefully modeled and eliminated. Furthermore, it is seen that even a relatively coarse initialization can be adequate for long-term indoor navigation without an excessive computational burden if a detailed map is available. The cycle slip detection results suggest that even small cycle slips can be detected with mass-market GNSS receivers, but the detection rate needs to be improved

Recent Advances in Indoor Localization Systems and Technologies

Despite the enormous technical progress seen in the past few years, the maturity of indoor localization technologies has not yet reached the level of GNSS solutions. The 23 selected papers in this book present the recent advances and new developments in indoor localization systems and technologies, propose novel or improved methods with increased performance, provide insight into various aspects of quality control, and also introduce some unorthodox positioning methods

A study on mobile ad hoc networks equipped with free-space optical capabilities.

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) offers a cost-effective solution for communications in areas where infrastructure is unavailable, e.g. emergency response, disaster recovery, and battlefield scenarios. Traditional MANETs operate in the radio frequency (RF) spectrum, where the available bandwidth is facing the challenge of the rapidly increasing demands. Free-space optics (FSO) provides an attractive complement to RF wireless MANETs because of its high bandwidth and interference-free operation. An effort to combine the main advantages of MANET and FSO technologies by equipping the network nodes with hybrid communications capabilities will be presented. Computer models of such a network were created using the network simulator OPNET Modeler. Various indicators of network performance, including packet loss ratio, end-to-end delay, throughput, etc. were obtained through simulation and examined. The analysis will be of significant assistance in the design and implementation of such next-generation MANETs

From Compression of Wearable-based Data to Effortless Indoor Positioning

In recent years, wearable devices have become ever-present in modern society. They are typically defined as small, battery-restricted devices, worn on, in, or in very close proximity to a human body. Their performance is defined by their functionalities as much as by their comfortability and convenience. As such, they need to be compact yet powerful, thus making energy efficiency an extremely important and relevant aspect of the system. The market of wearable devices is nowadays dominated by smartwatches and fitness bands, which are capable of gathering numerous sensor-based data such as temperature, pressure, heart rate, or blood oxygen level, which have to be processed in real-time, stored, or wirelessly transferred while consuming as little energy as possible to ensure long battery life. Implementing compression schemes directly at the wearable device is one of the relevant methods to reduce the volume of data and to minimize the number of required operations while processing them, as raw measurements include plenty of redundancies that can be removed without damaging the useful information itself. This thesis presents a number of contributions in the field of compression of wearable-based data, mainly in areas of lossy compression techniques designated for the time series sensor-based data and positioning. In the scope of this work, two novel time-series compression techniques are proposed, namely Direct Lightweight Temporal Compression (DLTC) and Altered Symbolic Aggregate Approximation (ASAX), which are specifically designed to address relevant challenges of modern wearable systems. As many of the modern wearables also possess localization capabilities critical for navigation, tracking, and monitoring applications, reducing the computational and storage demands for indoor positioning applications is the second addressed challenge. Performing the positioning task quickly and efficiently on all connected devices, including wearables, becomes crucial in industrial applications, eHealth, or security. As the localization technique of choice in Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) signal-obscured scenarios, positioning via fingerprinting proves a reliable and efficient solution, while arising new challenges to be solved. Improving the efficiency of the fingerprinting-based system by applying lossy compressions onto the training radio map is realized by proposing, implementing, and evaluating various novel dimensionality-reduction techniques. This thesis proposes Element-Wise cOmpression using K-means (EWOK), a bitlevel compression based on element-wise k-means clustering, radio Map compression Employing Signal Statistics (MESS), a sample-wise compression that extracts signal statistics based on their locations, as well as evaluates feature-wise methods Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Auto-Encoder (AE) that transform fingerprints into low-dimensional representation. The evaluation in the thesis shows the effectiveness of each compression scheme on 26 different datasets and provides the results achieved by combining the individual schemes together, accomplishing multi-dimensional radio map compression that sustains high positioning accuracy of the dataset, despite manyfold size reduction. The processing requirements of the positioning system are further addressed by proposing a cascade of models that reduces the required search space of the algorithm. By combining numerous Machine Learning (ML) architectures, it is capable of further reducing the positioning time (and thus, positioning effort), while improving the positioning performance. The thesis further includes the introduction of an indoor positioning dataset collected by the author, denoted TUJI 1, a novel performance metric to evaluate the latency caused by the lossy compression, and several crucial adjustments to the distance metric calculations, generalizing their applicability. The thesis provides novel insights into the compression of sensor-based, timeseries data and into reducing the computational effort of the fingerprinting positioning schemes while introducing a relevant number of novel and efficient solutions beyond the State-of-the-Art.Cotutelle -yhteisväitöskirj

Sensor Fusion for Location Estimation Technologies

Location estimation performance is not always satisfactory and improving it can be expensive. The performance of location estimation technology can be increased by refining the existing location estimation technologies. A better way of increasing performance is to use multiple technologies and combine the available data provided by them in order to obtain better results. Also, maintaining one's location privacy while using location estimation technology is a challenge. How can this problem be solved? In order to make it easier to perform sensor fusion on the available data and to speed up development, a flexible framework centered around a component-based architecture was designed. In order to test the performance of location estimation using the proposed sensor fusion framework, the framework and all the necessary components were implemented and tested. In order to solve the location estimation privacy issues, a comprehensive design that considers all aspects of the problem, from the physical aspects of using radio transmissions to communicating and using location data, is proposed. The experimental results of testing the location estimation sensor fusion framework show that by using sensor fusion, the availability of location estimation is always increased and the accuracy is always increased on average. The experimental results also allow the profiling of the sensor fusion framework's time and energy consumption. In the case of time consumption, there is a 0.32% - 17.06% - 5.05% - 77.58% split between results overhead, engine overhead, component communication time and component execution time on an average. The more measurements are gathered by the data gathering components, the more the component execution time increases relative to all the other execution times because component execution time is the only one that increases while the others remain constant