A Survey of Positioning Systems Using Visible LED Lights

© 2018 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.As Global Positioning System (GPS) cannot provide satisfying performance in indoor environments, indoor positioning technology, which utilizes indoor wireless signals instead of GPS signals, has grown rapidly in recent years. Meanwhile, visible light communication (VLC) using light devices such as light emitting diodes (LEDs) has been deemed to be a promising candidate in the heterogeneous wireless networks that may collaborate with radio frequencies (RF) wireless networks. In particular, light-fidelity has a great potential for deployment in future indoor environments because of its high throughput and security advantages. This paper provides a comprehensive study of a novel positioning technology based on visible white LED lights, which has attracted much attention from both academia and industry. The essential characteristics and principles of this system are deeply discussed, and relevant positioning algorithms and designs are classified and elaborated. This paper undertakes a thorough investigation into current LED-based indoor positioning systems and compares their performance through many aspects, such as test environment, accuracy, and cost. It presents indoor hybrid positioning systems among VLC and other systems (e.g., inertial sensors and RF systems). We also review and classify outdoor VLC positioning applications for the first time. Finally, this paper surveys major advances as well as open issues, challenges, and future research directions in VLC positioning systems.Peer reviewe

Optical Wireless and Millimeter Waves for 5G Access Networks

Growing bandwidth demands are driving the search for increased network capacity leading to the exploration of new wavelength ranges for future communication systems. Therefore, we consider two technologies that offer increased transmission bandwidths by virtue of their high carrier frequencies, namely optical wireless and millimeter-wave transmission. After highlighting the relevant electromagnetic (EM) spectrum region, we briefly describe the applications and properties of each approach coupled with a short history of their development. This is followed by a performance comparison in two possible 5G links: outdoor point-to-point and indoor hotspots. We find that in both cases, there are regions where optical wireless communications (OWC) are better, but others where millimeter waves are to be preferred. Specifically, the former outperforms the latter over distances up to approximately 50 meters outdoors and a 10-meter hotspot radius indoors

Performance Analysis of Micro Unmanned Airborne Communication Relays for Cellular Networks

This paper analyses the potential of utilising small unmanned-aerial-vehicles (SUAV) as wireless relays for assisting cellular network performance. Whilst high altitude wireless relays have been investigated over the past 2 decades, the new class of low cost SUAVs offers new possibilities for addressing local traffic imbalances and providing emergency coverage.We present field-test results from an SUAV test-bed in both urban and rural environments. The results show that trough-to-peak throughput improvements can be achieved for users in poor coverage zones. Furthermore, the paper reinforces the experimental study with large-scale network analysis using both stochastic geometry and multi-cell simulation results.Comment: conferenc

Effective denoising and adaptive equalization of indoor optical wireless channel with artificial light using the discrete wavelet transform and artificial neural network

Indoor diffuse optical wireless (OW) communication systems performance is limited due to a number of effects; interference from natural and artificial light sources and multipath induced intersymbol interference (ISI). Artificial light interference (ALI) is a periodic signal with a spectrum profile extending up to the MHz range. It is the dominant source of performance degradation at low data rates, which can be removed using a high-pass filter (HPF). On the other hand, ISI is more severe at high data rates and an equalizing filter is incorporated at the receiver to compensate for the ISI. This paper provides the simulation results for a discrete wavelet transform (DWT)—artificial neural network (ANN)-based receiver architecture for on-and-off keying (OOK) non-return-to-zero (NRZ) scheme for a diffuse indoor OW link in the presence of ALI and ISI. ANN is adopted for classification acting as an efficient equalizer compared to the traditional equalizers. The ALI is effectively reduced by proper selection of the DWT coefficients resulting in improved receiver performance compared to the digital HPF. The simulated bit error rate (BER) performance of proposed DWT-ANN receiver structure for a diffuse indoor OW link operating at a data range of 10-200 Mbps is presented and discussed. The results are compared with performance of a diffuse link with an HPF-equalizer, ALI with/without filtering, and a line-of-sight (LOS) without filtering. We show that the DWT-ANN display a lower power requirement when compared to the receiver with an HPF-equalizer over a full range of delay spread in presence of ALI. However, as expected compared to the ideal LOS link the power penalty is higher reaching to 6 dB at 200 Mbps data rate

Air Pollution Exposure Monitoring using Portable Low-cost Air Quality Sensors

Urban environments with a high degree of industrialization are infested with hazardous chemicals and airborne pollutants. These pollutants can have devastating effects on human health, causing both acute and chronic diseases such as respiratory infections, lung cancer, and heart disease. Air pollution monitoring is vital not only to citizens, warning them on the health risks of air pollutants, but also to policy-makers,assisting them on drafting regulations and laws that aim at minimizing those health risks. Currently,air pollution monitoring predominantly relies on expensive high-end static sensor stations. These stations produce only aggregated information about air pollutants, and are unable to capture variations in individual’s air pollution exposure. As an alternative, this article develops a citizen-based air pollution monitoring system that captures individual exposure levels to air pollutants during daily indoor and outdoor activities. We present a low-cost portable sensor and carry out a measurement campaign using the sensors to demonstrate the validity and benefits of citizen-based pollution measurements. Specifically, we (i) successfully classify the data into indoor and outdoor, and (ii) validate the consistency and accuracy of our outdoor-classified data to the measurements of a high-end reference monitoring station. Our experimental results further prove the effectiveness of our campaign by (i) providing fine-grained air pollution insights over a wide geographical area, (ii) identifying probable causes of air pollution dependent on the area, and (iii) providing citizens with personalized insights about air pollutants in their daily commute.Peer reviewe

A Localization System for Optimizing the Deployment of Small Cells in 2-Tier Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

Due to the ever growing population of mobile device users and expansion on the number of devices and applications requiring data usage, there is an increasing demand for improved capacity in wireless cellular networks. Cell densification and 2-tier heterogeneous networks (HetNets) are two solutions which will assist 5G systems in meeting these growing capacity demands. Small-cell deployment over existing heterogeneous networks have been considered by researchers. Different strategies for deploying these small-cells within the existing network among which are random, cell-edge and high user concentration (HUC) have also been explored. Small cells deployed on locations of HUC offloads traffic from existing network infrastructure, ensure good Quality of Service (QoS) and balanced load in the network but there is a challenge of identifying HUC locations. There has been considerable research performed into techniques for determining user location and cell deployment. Currently localization can be achieved using time dependent methods such as Time of Arrival (ToA), Time Difference of Arrival (TDoA), or Global Positioning Systems (GPS). GPS based solutions provide high accuracy user positioning but suffer from concerns over user privacy, and other time dependent approaches require regular synchronization which can be difficult to achieve in practice. Alternatively, Received Signal Strength (RSS) based solutions can provide simple anonymous user data, requiring no extra hardware within the mobile handset but often rely on triangulation from adjacent Base Stations (BS). In mobile cellular networks such solutions are therefore often only applicable near the cell edge, as installing additional BS would increase the complexity and cost of a network deployment. The work presented in this thesis overcomes these limitations by providing an observer system for wireless networks that can be used to periodically monitor the cell coverage area and identify regions of high concentrations of users for possible small cell deployment in 2-tier heterogeneous networks. The observer system comprises of two collinear antennas separated by λ/2. The relative phase of each antenna was varied using a phase shifter so that the combined output of the two antennas were used to create sum and difference radiation patterns, and to steer the antenna radiation pattern creating different azimuth positions for AoA estimation. Statistical regression analysis was used to develop range estimation models based on four different environment empirical pathloss models for user range estimation. Users were located into clusters by classifying them into azimuth-range classes and counting the number of users in each class. Locations for small cell deployment were identified based on class population. BPEM, ADEM, BUEM, EARM and NLOS models were developed for more accurate range estimation. A prototype system was implemented and tested both outdoor and indoor using a network of WiFi nodes. Experimental results show close relationship with simulation and an average PER in range estimation error of 80% by applying developed error models. Based on both simulation and experiment, system showed good performance. By deploying micro-, pico-, or femto-cells in areas of higher user concentration, high data rates and good quality of service in the network can be maintained. The observer system provides the network manager with relative angle of arrival (AoA), distance estimation and relative location of user clusters within the cell. The observer system divides the cell into a series of azimuthal and range sectors, and determines which sector the users are located in. Simulation and a prototype design of the system is presented and results have shown system robustness and high accuracy for its purpose