To study, design and prove an innovative indoor positioning concept for mass-market applications with a single node local infrastructure using GNSS, Round-Trip-Time (RTT) and other sensors

 

Indoor positioning technologies are primarily driven by 2 sets of use cases (e.g. 5G positioning use cases of 3GPP-standardization body for 3G, 4G and 5G):

- Very high accuracy (<1m) in bounded service areas (e.g. Industry automation).

- Coarse accuracy (<10m) with quasi-ubiquitous coverage (e.g. To support emergency call and ehealth, as identified in 3GPP TR22.872 and by firstnet, the authority managing first responders network in the USA, asset tracking for instance on factory floors).

Thanks to dedicated, dense local infrastructures, the first one may leverage on existing or emerging solutions such as Ultra-Wide-Band, Round-Trip-Time (RTT) - the 2-way ranging for Wireless Local-Area-Network (WLAN), or 5G New Radio.

Solutions for the coarse accuracy cannot afford dense infrastructure to provide quasi-ubiquitous coverage and in spite of significant RD effort over the last 20 years, GNSS and mobile broadband do not meet the performance target indoor. New solutions are needed, for instance relying on wireless nodes associated to internet access point in housing (e.g. WLAN). However, to work with a single node, the positioning technology should combine true distance and direction measurement. This activity aims to investigate innovative solutions to cost-efficient indoor positioning. It shall spin in ?true-distance+direction? positioning from air navigation (and rescue homing operation) and apply it to mass-market wireless technologies combined to High-Sensitivity GNSS and other sensors (e.g. Transition to light indoor and outdoor). Considering the targeted use cases, the energy efficiency of the solutions will be addressed as well, with approaches such as hybridization and sensor collaboration.

The identified solutions will be integrated into breadboards to demonstrate the performances obtained in representative environments and to benchmark with state-of-the-art.

This activity encompasses the following tasks:

- Characterization of the relevant state-of-the-art (e.g. RTT, Direction Finding and dual frequency mass-market GNSS receivers)

- System architecture, design and development of breadboards for the innovative hybrid solutions

- Field trials and performance assessment

- Synthesis, outreach and recommendation for ways forward.