Indoor geolocation science is vital for the implementation of the fourth generation (4G) wireless information networks. The 4G wireless indoor networks are expected to provide geolocation services to locate people and important portable equipment and support multi-media services to interconnect a wide range of equipment with a wide range of QoS and dynamic data rate requirements at a very low cost. Geolocation applications supported by these networks will provide a number of innovative and vital technologies for commercial, public safety, and military applications. In commercial applications for residential and nursing homes environments indoor geolocation technology will provide for tracking the elderly and children who are away from visual supervision, for navigating the blind and other special need people, and for locating in-demand portable equipment in hospitals. In the public safety and military applications, indoor geolocation systems will provide for tracking the inmates in prisons and navigating policeman, fire fighters, and soldiers to safely complete their rescue operation inside buildings. Although the myriad of indoor geolocation applications have already attracted public attention to the extent that it has been addressed in several mass media scientific programs, there has been no serious attempt to develop a scientific basis to evaluate the physical limitation of these systems.
The existing geolocation system (GPS) do not work in indoor areas and there is a need for new and innovative signal processing and locating algorithms to handle positioning in indoor area. However, there is no scientific framework that accurately and quantitatively relates the multipath characteristics of the indoor radio channel to excessive positioning error observed in geolocation systems operating in indoor environments.
The principal research goal of this project is to provide a foundation for the indoor geolocation science that must provide for the design and performance evaluation of indoor geolocation systems. Two specific research objectives to be met to achieve this goal are:
Objective 1: To analyze the multipath characteristics of the indoor radio propagation that affects the performance of indoor geolocation systems through empirical broadband measurements in typical sites, and design of statistical measurement based and geometrical models for the behavior of the channel.
Objective 2: To use the results of objective 1 to lay a foundation for the design and performance evaluation of distributed indoor geolocation systems capable of locating objects in smart indoor spaces where numerous unreliable sources interact to provide an accurate location of each element.
The novel methodologies developed to meet the above objectives can be further extended to other evolving 4G wireless information network applications providing both geolocation and telecommunication services and operating in severe multipath environments such as those observed in urban canyons.
Keywords: indoor geolocation, indoor navigation, multi-media wireless, indoor radio propagation, angle of arrival, time of arrival, intelligent homes, wireless information networks.
