Combining wireless and visual tracking for an indoor environment

There has been a lot of research done towards both camera and Wi-Fi tracking respectively, both these techniques have their benefits and drawbacks. By combining these technologies it is possible to eliminate their respective weaknesses, to increase the possibilities of the system as a whole. This is accomplished by fusing the sensor data from Wi-Fi and camera before inserting it in a particle filter. This will result in a more accurate and robust localization system

Dense multipath component polarization and wall attenuation at 1.35 GHz in an office environment

This paper presents an analysis of dense multipath components in office meeting rooms. Radio channel sounding measurements at 1.35 GHz were performed with transmitter and receiver in the same room (intra-room) and in adjacent rooms (inter-room). Specular and dense multipath components were estimated with the RiMAX maximum-likelihood algorithm. The dense multipath reverberation characteristics were found to be not significantly different between polarization subchannels for both the intra-room and the inter-room channels, supporting the validity of a scalar dense multipath model. The specular and dense multipath wall attenuation losses were found to be 12.0 and 5.4 dB, respectively

Sub-GHz LPWAN network coexistence, management and virtualization : an overview and open research challenges

The IoT domain is characterized by many applications that require low-bandwidth communications over a long range, at a low cost and at low power. Low power wide area networks (LPWANs) fulfill these requirements by using sub-GHz radio frequencies (typically 433 or 868 MHz) with typical transmission ranges in the order of 1 up to 50 km. As a result, a single base station can cover large areas and can support high numbers of connected devices (> 1000 per base station). Notorious initiatives in this domain are LoRa, Sigfox and the upcoming IEEE 802.11ah (or "HaLow") standard. Although these new technologies have the potential to significantly impact many IoT deployments, the current market is very fragmented and many challenges exists related to deployment, scalability, management and coexistence aspects, making adoption of these technologies difficult for many companies. To remedy this, this paper proposes a conceptual framework to improve the performance of LPWAN networks through in-network optimization, cross-technology coexistence and cooperation and virtualization of management functions. In addition, the paper gives an overview of state of the art solutions and identifies open challenges for each of these aspects

Flexible Multimodal Sub-Gigahertz Communication for Heterogeneous Internet of Things Applications

To realize low-power and low-cost wireless communication over long distances, several wireless standards using sub-1 GHz frequencies have recently been proposed, each with their own strengths and weaknesses in terms of coverage, energy consumption, and throughput. However, none of them are currently flexible enough to satisfy the requirements of future dynamic and heterogeneous IoT applications. To alleviate this, a novel architecture that uses a multimodal device for flexibly employing a variety of heterogeneous sub-1 GHz wireless networks is proposed. It greatly increases network flexibility, resilience, and performance. A device design is presented together with an abstraction layer that combines the different networks into a single flexible virtual network substrate. The article elaborates on the qualitative advantages of this approach. Measurement-based simulation results show advantages in terms of energy efficiency, with significant reduction in energy use compared to a single-technology solution in a representative IoT track and trace scenario. Finally, the article identifies several open research challenges that need to be resolved to fully realize this vision of flexible multimodal communication for demanding IoT applications

Observations on drought and vegetation: A global approach and local study of the Congo Basin

Current research suggests that climate change and continued anthropogenic forcing of the climate system may increase the occurrence of extreme events such as droughts in the near future. Prolonged droughts are potentially destructive because of widespread impacts and difficulty in prediction. In addition, droughts interact in complex ways with vegetation systems, inducing abrupt rather than gradual changes in vegetation. Using satellite and station rainfall data, this research seeks to identify patterns in drought and vegetation change on a global scale and in the tropics (15ºN to 35ºS), where precipitation is the predominant determinant of climate. It is observed that long drought occurs in regions of variability in vegetation. Additionally, long drought is observed in regions on the fringe between dominant vegetation types of desert, grassland, and forest. These results suggest that prolonged drought may be a significant contributor to abrupt vegetation changes. The other part of this study is a regional investigation of vegetation change and drought in the Congo Basin. The correlation between drought and forest loss in the Congo is not clear. Preliminary studies of the atmospheric mechanisms governing drought in the Congo are presented. The results of this work as a whole will provide a better understanding of drought patterns and vegetation responses to drought, ultimately to provide better adaptation to a more extreme future climate.Geological SciencesPhysic

Exploring the feasibility of indoor human positioning by using radio channel properties of a single link

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