Technologies and solutions for location-based services in smart cities: past, present, and future

Location-based services (LBS) in smart cities have drastically altered the way cities operate, giving a new dimension to the life of citizens. LBS rely on location of a device, where proximity estimation remains at its core. The applications of LBS range from social networking and marketing to vehicle-toeverything communications. In many of these applications, there is an increasing need and trend to learn the physical distance between nearby devices. This paper elaborates upon the current needs of proximity estimation in LBS and compares them against the available Localization and Proximity (LP) finding technologies (LP technologies in short). These technologies are compared for their accuracies and performance based on various different parameters, including latency, energy consumption, security, complexity, and throughput. Hereafter, a classification of these technologies, based on various different smart city applications, is presented. Finally, we discuss some emerging LP technologies that enable proximity estimation in LBS and present some future research areas

Passive round-trip-time positioning in dense ieee 802.11 networks

The search for a unique and globally available location solution has attracted researchers for a long time. However, a solution for indoor scenarios, where high accuracy is needed, and Global Positioning System (GPS) is not available, has not been found yet. Despite the number of proposals in the literature, some require too long a calibration time for constructing the fingerprinting map, some rely on the periodic broadcast of positioning information that may downgrade the data communication channel, while others require specific hardware components that are not expected to be carried on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) wireless devices. The scalability of the location solution is another key parameter for next-generation internet of things (IoT) and 5G scenarios. A passive solution for indoor positioning of WiFi devices is first introduced here, which merges a time-difference of arrival (TDOA) algorithm with the novel fine time measurements (FTM) introduced in IEEE 802.11mc. A proof of concept of the WiFi passive TDOA algorithm is detailed in this paper, together with a thorough discussion on the requirements of the proposed algorithmThis work was funded by the Spanish Government and European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) through Comisión Interministerial de Ciencia y Tecnología (CICYT) under Project PGC2018-099945-B-I00.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Collaborative Indoor Positioning Systems: A Systematic Review

Research and development in Collaborative Indoor Positioning Systems (CIPSs) is growing steadily due to their potential to improve on the performance of their non-collaborative counterparts. In contrast to the outdoors scenario, where Global Navigation Satellite System is widely adopted, in (collaborative) indoor positioning systems a large variety of technologies, techniques, and methods is being used. Moreover, the diversity of evaluation procedures and scenarios hinders a direct comparison. This paper presents a systematic review that gives a general view of the current CIPSs. A total of 84 works, published between 2006 and 2020, have been identified. These articles were analyzed and classified according to the described system’s architecture, infrastructure, technologies, techniques, methods, and evaluation. The results indicate a growing interest in collaborative positioning, and the trend tend to be towards the use of distributed architectures and infrastructure-less systems. Moreover, the most used technologies to determine the collaborative positioning between users are wireless communication technologies (Wi-Fi, Ultra-WideBand, and Bluetooth). The predominant collaborative positioning techniques are Received Signal Strength Indication, Fingerprinting, and Time of Arrival/Flight, and the collaborative methods are particle filters, Belief Propagation, Extended Kalman Filter, and Least Squares. Simulations are used as the main evaluation procedure. On the basis of the analysis and results, several promising future research avenues and gaps in research were identified

Classification and localization of electromagnetic and ultrasonic pulsed emitters

Mención Internacional en el título de doctorThe localization of radiative sources is very important in many fields of work such as: sonar, radar and underwater radar, indoor localization in wireless networks, earthquake epicenter localization, defective assets localization in electrical facilities and so forth. In the process of locating radiative sources exist many issues which can provoke errors in the localization. The signals acquired may belong to different sources or they can be mixed with environmental noise, then, their separation before using localization algorithms is of great interest to be efficient and accurate in the computational process. Furthermore, the geometry and radiation characteristics of the receivers, the nature of the signal or their measuring process may cause deviations in the signal onset calculus and therefore the source localization could be displaced from the actual position. In this thesis, there are three kinds of algorithms to undertake three steps in the emitter localization: signal separation, onset and time delay estimation of the signals and source localization. For each step, in order to reduce the error in the localization, several algorithms are analyzed and compared in each application, to choose the most reliable. As the first step, to separate different kinds of signals is of interest to facilitate further processing. In this thesis, different optimization techniques are presented over the power ratio (PR) maps method. The PR uses a selective spectral signal characterization to extract the features of the analyzed signals. The technique identifies automatically the most representative frequency bands which report a great separation of the different kinds of signals in the PR map. After separating and selecting the signals, it is of interest to compare the algorithms to calculate the onset and time delay of the pulsed signals to know their performance because the time variables are inputs to the most common triangulation algorithms to locate radiative and ultrasonic sources. An overview of the algorithms used to estimate the time of flight (ToF) and time differences of arrival (TDoA) of pulsed signals is done in this thesis. In the comparison, there is also a new algorithm based on statics of high order, which is proposed in this thesis. The survey of their performance is done applied to muscle deep estimation, localization in one dimension (1D), and for the localization of emitters in three dimensions (3D). The results show how the presented algorithm yields great results. As the last step in the radiative source localization, the formulation and principle of work of both iterative and non-iterative triangulation algorithms are presented. A new algorithm is presented as a combination of two already existing improving their performance when working alone. All the algorithms, the proposed and the previous which already exist, are compared in terms of accuracy and computational time. The proposed algorithm reports good results in terms of accuracy and it is one of the fastest in computational time. Once the localization is achieved, it is of great interest to understand how the errors in the determination of the onset of the signals are propagated in the emitter localization. The triangulation algorithms estimate the radiative source position using time variables as inputs: ToF, TDoA or pseudo time of flight (pToF) and the receiver positions. The propagation of the errors in the time variables to the radiative source localization is done in two dimensions (2D) and 3D. New spherical diagrams have been created to represent the directions where the localization is more or less sensible to the errors. This study and their sphere diagrams are presented for several antenna layouts. Finally, how the errors in the positioning of the receivers are propagated to the emitter localization is analyzed. In this study, the effect in the propagation of both the relative distance from the receivers to the emitter and the direction between them has been characterized. The propagation of the error considering the direction is also represented in spherical diagrams. For a preferred direction identified in the spheres, the propagated error in the source localization has been quantified regarding both the source distance and the magnitude of the errors in the receivers positioning.Programa Oficial de Doctorado en Ingeniería Eléctrica, Electrónica y AutomáticaPresidente: Andrea Cavallini.- Secretario: José Antonio García Souto.- Vocal: Iliana Portugués Peter

Efficient AoA-based wireless indoor localization for hospital outpatients using mobile devices

The motivation of this work is to help outpatients find their corresponding departments or clinics, thus, it needs to provide indoor positioning services with a room-level accuracy. Unlike wireless outdoor localization that is dominated by the global positioning system (GPS), wireless indoor localization is still an open issue. Many different schemes are being developed to meet the increasing demand for indoor localization services. In this paper, we investigated the AoA-based wireless indoor localization for outpatients’ wayfinding in a hospital, where Wi-Fi access points (APs) are deployed, in line, on the ceiling. The target position can be determined by a mobile device, like a smartphone, through an efficient geometric calculation with two known APs coordinates and the angles of the incident radios. All possible positions in which the target may appear have been comprehensively investigated, and the corresponding solutions were proven to be the same. Experimental results show that localization error was less than 2.5 m, about 80% of the time, which can satisfy the outpatients’ requirements for wayfinding

Privacy-Preserving by Design: Indoor Positioning System Using Wi-Fi Passive TDOA

Indoor localization systems have become increasingly important in a wide range of applications, including industry, security, logistics, and emergency services. However, the growing demand for accurate localization has heightened concerns over privacy, as many localization systems rely on active signals that can be misused by an adversary to track users' movements or manipulate their measurements. This paper presents PassiFi, a novel passive Wi-Fi time-based indoor localization system that effectively balances accuracy and privacy. PassiFi uses a passive WiFi Time Difference of Arrival (TDoA) approach that ensures users' privacy and safeguards the integrity of their measurement data while still achieving high accuracy. The system adopts a fingerprinting approach to address multi-path and non-line-of-sight problems and utilizes deep neural networks to learn the complex relationship between TDoA and location. Evaluation in a real-world testbed demonstrates PassiFi's exceptional performance, surpassing traditional multilateration by 128%, achieving sub-meter accuracy on par with state-of-the-art active measurement systems, all while preserving privacy

Power-Efficient Indoor Localization Using Adaptive Channel-aware Ultra-wideband DL-TDOA

Among the various Ultra-wideband (UWB) ranging methods, the absence of uplink communication or centralized computation makes downlink time-difference-of-arrival (DL-TDOA) localization the most suitable for large-scale industrial deployments. However, temporary or permanent obstacles in the deployment region often lead to non-line-of-sight (NLOS) channel path and signal outage effects, which result in localization errors. Prior research has addressed this problem by increasing the ranging frequency, which leads to a heavy increase in the user device power consumption. It also does not contribute to any increase in localization accuracy under line-of-sight (LOS) conditions. In this paper, we propose and implement a novel low-power channel-aware dynamic frequency DL-TDOA ranging algorithm. It comprises NLOS probability predictor based on a convolutional neural network (CNN), a dynamic ranging frequency control module, and an IMU sensor-based ranging filter. Based on the conducted experiments, we show that the proposed algorithm achieves 50% higher accuracy in NLOS conditions while having 46% lower power consumption in LOS conditions compared to baseline methods from prior research

Analysis of the scalability of UWB indoor localization solutions for high user densities

Radio frequency (RF) technologies are often used to track assets in indoor environments. Among others, ultra-wideband (UWB) has constantly gained interest thanks to its capability to obtain typical errors of 30 cm or lower, making it more accurate than other wireless technologies such as WiFi, which normally can predict the location with several meters accuracy. However, mainly due to technical requirements that are part of the standard, conventional medium access strategies such as clear channel assessment, are not straightforward to implement. Since most scientific papers focus on UWB accuracy improvements of a single user, it is not clear to which extend this limitation and other design choices impact the scalability of UWB indoor positioning systems. We investigated the scalability of indoor localization solutions, to prove that UWB can be used when hundreds of tags are active in the same system. This paper provides mathematical models that calculate the theoretical supported user density for multiple localization approaches, namely Time Difference of Arrival (TDoA) and Two-Way Ranging (TWR) with different MAC protocol combinations, i.e., ALOHA and TDMA. Moreover, this paper applies these formulas to a number of realistic UWB configurations to study the impact of different UWB schemes and settings. When applied to the 802.15.4a compliant Decawave DW1000 chip, the scalability dramatically degrades if the system operates with uncoordinated protocols and two-way communication schemes. In the best case scenario, UWB DW1000 chips can actively support up to 6171 tags in a single domain cell (no handover) with well-selected settings and choices, i.e., when adopting the combination of TDoA (one-way link) and TDMA. As a consequence, UWB can be used to simultaneously localize thousands of nodes in a dense network. However, we also show that the number of supported devices varies greatly depending on the MAC and PHY configuration choices

A two phase framework for visible light-based positioning in an indoor environment: performance, latency, and illumination

Recently with the advancement of solid state lighting and the application thereof to Visible Light Communications (VLC), the concept of Visible Light Positioning (VLP) has been targeted as a very attractive indoor positioning system (IPS) due to its ubiquity, directionality, spatial reuse, and relatively high modulation bandwidth. IPSs, in general, have 4 major components (1) a modulation, (2) a multiple access scheme, (3) a channel measurement, and (4) a positioning algorithm. A number of VLP approaches have been proposed in the literature and primarily focus on a fixed combination of these elements and moreover evaluate the quality of the contribution often by accuracy or precision alone. In this dissertation, we provide a novel two-phase indoor positioning algorithmic framework that is able to increase robustness when subject to insufficient anchor luminaries and also incorporate any combination of the four major IPS components. The first phase provides robust and timely albeit less accurate positioning proximity estimates without requiring more than a single luminary anchor using time division access to On Off Keying (OOK) modulated signals while the second phase provides a more accurate, conventional, positioning estimate approach using a novel geometric constrained triangulation algorithm based on angle of arrival (AoA) measurements. However, this approach is still an application of a specific combination of IPS components. To achieve a broader impact, the framework is employed on a collection of IPS component combinations ranging from (1) pulsed modulations to multicarrier modulations, (2) time, frequency, and code division multiple access, (3) received signal strength (RSS), time of flight (ToF), and AoA, as well as (4) trilateration and triangulation positioning algorithms. Results illustrate full room positioning coverage ranging with median accuracies ranging from 3.09 cm to 12.07 cm at 50% duty cycle illumination levels. The framework further allows for duty cycle variation to include dimming modulations and results range from 3.62 cm to 13.15 cm at 20% duty cycle while 2.06 cm to 8.44 cm at a 78% duty cycle. Testbed results reinforce this frameworks applicability. Lastly, a novel latency constrained optimization algorithm can be overlaid on the two phase framework to decide when to simply use the coarse estimate or when to expend more computational resources on a potentially more accurate fine estimate. The creation of the two phase framework enables robust, illumination, latency sensitive positioning with the ability to be applied within a vast array of system deployment constraints