485 research outputs found
Distributed and adaptive location identification system for mobile devices
Indoor location identification and navigation need to be as simple, seamless,
and ubiquitous as its outdoor GPS-based counterpart is. It would be of great
convenience to the mobile user to be able to continue navigating seamlessly as
he or she moves from a GPS-clear outdoor environment into an indoor environment
or a GPS-obstructed outdoor environment such as a tunnel or forest. Existing
infrastructure-based indoor localization systems lack such capability, on top
of potentially facing several critical technical challenges such as increased
cost of installation, centralization, lack of reliability, poor localization
accuracy, poor adaptation to the dynamics of the surrounding environment,
latency, system-level and computational complexities, repetitive
labor-intensive parameter tuning, and user privacy. To this end, this paper
presents a novel mechanism with the potential to overcome most (if not all) of
the abovementioned challenges. The proposed mechanism is simple, distributed,
adaptive, collaborative, and cost-effective. Based on the proposed algorithm, a
mobile blind device can potentially utilize, as GPS-like reference nodes,
either in-range location-aware compatible mobile devices or preinstalled
low-cost infrastructure-less location-aware beacon nodes. The proposed approach
is model-based and calibration-free that uses the received signal strength to
periodically and collaboratively measure and update the radio frequency
characteristics of the operating environment to estimate the distances to the
reference nodes. Trilateration is then used by the blind device to identify its
own location, similar to that used in the GPS-based system. Simulation and
empirical testing ascertained that the proposed approach can potentially be the
core of future indoor and GPS-obstructed environments
Opportunistic timing signals for pervasive mobile localization
MenciĂłn Internacional en el tĂtulo de doctorThe proliferation of handheld devices and the pressing need of location-based services call for
precise and accurate ubiquitous geographic mobile positioning that can serve a vast set of devices.
Despite the large investments and efforts in academic and industrial communities, a pin-point solution
is however still far from reality. Mobile devices mainly rely on Global Navigation Satellite
System (GNSS) to position themselves. GNSS systems are known to perform poorly in dense urban
areas and indoor environments, where the visibility of GNSS satellites is reduced drastically.
In order to ensure interoperability between the technologies used indoor and outdoor, a pervasive
positioning system should still rely on GNSS, yet complemented with technologies that can
guarantee reliable radio signals in indoor scenarios. The key fact that we exploit is that GNSS signals
are made of data with timing information. We then investigate solutions where opportunistic
timing signals can be extracted out of terrestrial technologies. These signals can then be used as
additional inputs of the multi-lateration problem. Thus, we design and investigate a hybrid system
that combines range measurements from the Global Positioning System (GPS), the world’s
most utilized GNSS system, and terrestrial technologies; the most suitable one to consider in our
investigation is WiFi, thanks to its large deployment in indoor areas. In this context, we first start
investigating standalone WiFi Time-of-flight (ToF)-based localization. Time-of-flight echo techniques
have been recently suggested for ranging mobile devices overWiFi radios. However, these
techniques have yielded only moderate accuracy in indoor environments because WiFi ToF measurements
suffer from extensive device-related noise which makes it challenging to differentiate
between direct path from non-direct path signal components when estimating the ranges. Existing
multipath mitigation techniques tend to fail at identifying the direct path when the device-related
Gaussian noise is in the same order of magnitude, or larger than the multipath noise. In order to
address this challenge, we propose a new method for filtering ranging measurements that is better
suited for the inherent large noise as found in WiFi radios. Our technique combines statistical
learning and robust statistics in a single filter. The filter is lightweight in the sense that it does not
require specialized hardware, the intervention of the user, or cumbersome on-site manual calibration.
This makes the method we propose as the first contribution of the present work particularly
suitable for indoor localization in large-scale deployments using existing legacy WiFi infrastructures.
We evaluate our technique for indoor mobile tracking scenarios in multipath environments,
and, through extensive evaluations across four different testbeds covering areas up to 1000m2, the filter is able to achieve a median ranging error between 1:7 and 2:4 meters.
The next step we envisioned towards preparing theoretical and practical basis for the aforementioned
hybrid positioning system is a deep inspection and investigation of WiFi and GPS ToF
ranges, and initial foundations of single-technology self-localization. Self-localization systems
based on the Time-of-Flight of radio signals are highly susceptible to noise and their performance
therefore heavily rely on the design and parametrization of robust algorithms. We study the noise
sources of GPS and WiFi ToF ranging techniques and compare the performance of different selfpositioning
algorithms at a mobile node using those ranges. Our results show that the localization
error varies greatly depending on the ranging technology, algorithm selection, and appropriate
tuning of the algorithms. We characterize the localization error using real-world measurements
and different parameter settings to provide guidance for the design of robust location estimators
in realistic settings.
These tools and foundations are necessary to tackle the problem of hybrid positioning system
providing high localization capabilities across indoor and outdoor environments. In this context,
the lack of a single positioning system that is able the fulfill the specific requirements of
diverse indoor and outdoor applications settings has led the development of a multitude of localization
technologies. Existing mobile devices such as smartphones therefore commonly rely on
a multi-RAT (Radio Access Technology) architecture to provide pervasive location information
in various environmental contexts as the user is moving. Yet, existing multi-RAT architectures
consider the different localization technologies as monolithic entities and choose the final navigation
position from the RAT that is foreseen to provide the highest accuracy in the particular
context. In contrast, we propose in this work to fuse timing range (Time-of-Flight) measurements
of diverse radio technologies in order to circumvent the limitations of the individual radio access
technologies and improve the overall localization accuracy in different contexts. We introduce
an Extended Kalman filter, modeling the unique noise sources of each ranging technology. As a
rich set of multiple ranges can be available across different RATs, the intelligent selection of the
subset of ranges with accurate timing information is critical to achieve the best positioning accuracy.
We introduce a novel geometrical-statistical approach to best fuse the set of timing ranging
measurements. We also address practical problems of the design space, such as removal of WiFi
chipset and environmental calibration to make the positioning system as autonomous as possible.
Experimental results show that our solution considerably outperforms the use of monolithic
technologies and methods based on classical fault detection and identification typically applied in
standalone GPS technology.
All the contributions and research questions described previously in localization and positioning
related topics suppose full knowledge of the anchors positions. In the last part of this work, we
study the problem of deriving proximity metrics without any prior knowledge of the positions of
the WiFi access points based on WiFi fingerprints, that is, tuples of WiFi Access Points (AP) and
respective received signal strength indicator (RSSI) values. Applications that benefit from proximity
metrics are movement estimation of a single node over time, WiFi fingerprint matching for localization systems and attacks on privacy. Using a large-scale, real-world WiFi fingerprint data
set consisting of 200,000 fingerprints resulting from a large deployment of wearable WiFi sensors,
we show that metrics from related work perform poorly on real-world data. We analyze the
cause for this poor performance, and show that imperfect observations of APs with commodity
WiFi clients in the neighborhood are the root cause. We then propose improved metrics to provide
such proximity estimates, without requiring knowledge of location for the observed AP. We
address the challenge of imperfect observations of APs in the design of these improved metrics.
Our metrics allow to derive a relative distance estimate based on two observed WiFi fingerprints.
We demonstrate that their performance is superior to the related work metrics.This work has been supported by IMDEA Networks InstitutePrograma Oficial de Doctorado en IngenierĂa TelemáticaPresidente: Francisco BarcelĂł Arroyo.- Secretario: Paolo Casari.- Vocal: Marco Fior
Indoor location based services challenges, requirements and usability of current solutions
Indoor Location Based Services (LBS), such as indoor navigation and tracking, still have to deal with both technical and non-technical challenges. For this reason, they have not yet found a prominent position in people’s everyday lives. Reliability and availability of indoor positioning technologies, the availability of up-to-date indoor maps, and privacy concerns associated with location data are some of the biggest challenges to their development. If these challenges were solved, or at least minimized, there would be more penetration into the user market. This paper studies the requirements of LBS applications, through a survey conducted by the authors, identifies the current challenges of indoor LBS, and reviews the available solutions that address the most important challenge, that of providing seamless indoor/outdoor positioning. The paper also looks at the potential of emerging solutions and the technologies that may help to handle this challenge
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
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