Innovative Wireless Localization Techniques and Applications

Innovative methodologies for the wireless localization of users and related applications are addressed in this thesis. In last years, the widespread diffusion of pervasive wireless communication (e.g., Wi-Fi) and global localization services (e.g., GPS) has boosted the interest and the research on location information and services. Location-aware applications are becoming fundamental to a growing number of consumers (e.g., navigation, advertising, seamless user interaction with smart places), private and public institutions in the fields of energy efficiency, security, safety, fleet management, emergency response. In this context, the position of the user - where is often more valuable for deploying services of interest than the identity of the user itself - who. In detail, opportunistic approaches based on the analysis of electromagnetic field indicators (i.e., received signal strength and channel state information) for the presence detection, the localization, the tracking and the posture recognition of cooperative and non-cooperative (device-free) users in indoor environments are proposed and validated in real world test sites. The methodologies are designed to exploit existing wireless infrastructures and commodity devices without any hardware modification. In outdoor environments, global positioning technologies are already available in commodity devices and vehicles, the research and knowledge transfer activities are actually focused on the design and validation of algorithms and systems devoted to support decision makers and operators for increasing efficiency, operations security, and management of large fleets as well as localized sensed information in order to gain situation awareness. In this field, a decision support system for emergency response and Civil Defense assets management (i.e., personnel and vehicles equipped with TETRA mobile radio) is described in terms of architecture and results of two-years of experimental validation

Evolution of Indoor Positioning Technologies: A Survey

Indoor positioning systems (IPS) use sensors and communication technologies to locate objects in indoor environments. IPS are attracting scientific and enterprise interest because there is a big market opportunity for applying these technologies. There are many previous surveys on indoor positioning systems; however, most of them lack a solid classification scheme that would structurally map a wide field such as IPS, or omit several key technologies or have a limited perspective; finally, surveys rapidly become obsolete in an area as dynamic as IPS. The goal of this paper is to provide a technological perspective of indoor positioning systems, comprising a wide range of technologies and approaches. Further, we classify the existing approaches in a structure in order to guide the review and discussion of the different approaches. Finally, we present a comparison of indoor positioning approaches and present the evolution and trends that we foresee

SELF-CALIBRATING PARTICIPATORY WIRELESS INDOOR LOCALIZATION

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

Improving Wifi Sensing And Networking With Channel State Information

In recent years, WiFi has a very rapid growth due to its high throughput, high efficiency, and low costs. Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) and Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing (OFDM) are two key technologies for providing high throughput and efficiency for WiFi systems. MIMO-OFDM provides Channel State Information (CSI) which represents the amplitude attenuation and phase shift of each transmit-receiver antenna pair of each carrier frequency. CSI helps WiFi achieve high throughput to meet the growing demands of wireless data traffic. CSI captures how wireless signals travel through the surrounding environment, so it can also be used for wireless sensing purposes. This dissertation presents how to improve WiFi sensing and networking with CSI. More specifically, this dissertation proposes deep learning models to improve the performance and capability of WiFi sensing and presents network protocols to reduce CSI feedback overhead for high efficiency WiFi networking. For WiFi sensing, there are many wireless sensing applications using CSI as the input in recent years. To get a better understanding of existing WiFi sensing technologies and future WiFi sensing trends, this dissertation presents a survey of signal processing techniques, algorithms, applications, performance results, challenges, and future trends of CSI-based WiFi sensing. CSI is widely used for gesture recognition and sign language recognition. Existing methods for WiFi-based sign language recognition have low accuracy and high costs when there are more than 200 sign gestures. The dissertation presents SignFi for sign language recognition using CSI and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). SignFi provides high accuracy and low costs for run-time testing for 276 sign gestures in the lab and home environments. For WiFi networking, although CSI provides high throughput for WiFi networks, it also introduces high overhead. WiFi transmitters need CSI feedback for transmit beamforming and rate adaptation. The size of CSI packets is very large and it grows very fast with respect to the number of antennas and channel width. CSI feedback introduces high overhead which reduces the performance and efficiency of WiFi systems, especially mobile and hand-held WiFi devices. This dissertation presents RoFi to reduce CSI feedback overhead based on the mobility status of WiFi receivers. CSI feedback compression reduces overhead, but WiFi receivers still need to send CSI feedback to the WiFi transmitter. The dissertation presents EliMO for eliminating CSI feedback without sacrificing beamforming gains

Avoin alustakehitys IEEE 802.15.4 -standardin mukaisessa langattomassa automaatiossa

This doctoral dissertation focuses on open source platform development in wireless automation under IEEE 802.15.4 standard. Research method is empirical. A platform based approach, which targets to the design of a generic open source sensor platform, was selected as a design method. The design targets were further focused by interviewing the experts from the academia and industry. Generic and modular sensor platform, the UWASA Node, was developed as an outcome of this process. Based on the implementation results, a wireless sensor and actuator network based on the UWASA Node was a feasible solution for many types of wireless automation applications. It was also possible to interface it with the other parts of the system. The targeted level of sensor platform genericity was achieved. However, it was also observed that the achieved level of genericity increased the software complexity. The development of commercial sensor platforms, which support IEEE 802.15.4 sensor networking, has narrowed down the role of open source sensor platforms, but they are not disappearing. Commercial software is usually closed and connected to a specified platform, which makes it unsuitable for research and development work. Even though there exits many commercial WSN solutions and the market expectations in this area are high, there is still a lot of work to do before the visions about Internet of Things (IoT) are fulfilled, especially in the context of distributed and locally centralized operations in the network. In terms of control engineering, one of the main research issues is to figure out how the well-known control techniques may be applied in wireless automation where WSN is part of the automation system. Open source platforms offer an important tool in this research and development work.Tämä väitöskirja käsittelee avointa alustakehitystä IEEE 802.15.4 -standardin mukaisessa langattomassa automaatiossa. Tutkimusmenetelmä on empiirinen. Työssä sovelletaan alustaperustaista suunnittelutapaa, joka tähtää yleiskäyttöisen avoimen anturialustan kehittämiseen. Suunnittelun tavoitteita tarkennettiin haastattelemalla alan asiantuntijoita teollisuudesta ja yliopistomaailmasta. Tuloksena suunniteltiin ja toteutettiin anturialusta, the UWASA Node. Implementointituloksista voidaan vetää johtopäätös, että anturialustan tavoiteltu yleiskäyttöisyystaso saavutettiin. Toisaalta saavutettu yleiskäyttöisyystaso lisäsi alustan ohjelmistoarkkitehtuurin monimutkaisuutta. Kaupallisten IEEE 802.15.4 -standardia tukevien anturialustojen tulo markkinoille vähentää avointen anturialustojen käyttöä, mutta ne eivät ole katoamassa. Kaupalliset ohjelmistot ovat tyypillisesti suljettuja ja sidoksissa tiettyyn alustaan, mikä tekee niistä sopimattomia tutkimus- ja tuotekehityskäyttöön. Vaikka nykyään on saatavilla useita kaupallisia langattomia anturi- ja toimilaiteverkkoja, vaaditaan vielä paljon työtä ennen kun kaikki esineiden Internetiin (Internet of Things) liittyvät visiot voidaan toteuttaa. Tämä koskee erityisesti langattomassa anturi- ja toimilaiteverkossa hajautetusti tai paikallisesti toteutettavia toimintoja. Säätötekniikan näkökulmasta keskeinen kysymys on, miten tunnettuja säätömenetelmiä tulee soveltaa langattomassa automaatiossa, jossa langaton anturi- ja toimilaiteverkko on osa automaatiojärjestelmää. Avoimet anturialustat ovat tärkeä työkalu sen selvittämisessä.fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

The Internet of Everything

In the era before IoT, the world wide web, internet, web 2.0 and social media made people’s lives comfortable by providing web services and enabling access personal data irrespective of their location. Further, to save time and improve efficiency, there is a need for machine to machine communication, automation, smart computing and ubiquitous access to personal devices. This need gave birth to the phenomenon of Internet of Things (IoT) and further to the concept of Internet of Everything (IoE)

The Internet of Everything

In the era before IoT, the world wide web, internet, web 2.0 and social media made people’s lives comfortable by providing web services and enabling access personal data irrespective of their location. Further, to save time and improve efficiency, there is a need for machine to machine communication, automation, smart computing and ubiquitous access to personal devices. This need gave birth to the phenomenon of Internet of Things (IoT) and further to the concept of Internet of Everything (IoE)