Summary

In a BAA 04-031 project between CWINS/WPI and Draper Laboratory, the primary objective is to enable accurate, robust localization and tracking of people/assets/objects in indoor environments.

This will be accomplished by developing a signal processing methodology and algorithms which address several fundamental limitations of existing active, passive, or aided concepts.  This development will be based on localization and tracking of electronic tags capable of receiving and retransmitting (with or without alteration) signals received from known signal sources located within a local network.  The key innovation is to more fully exploit the diversity of measurement phenomena and unique waveform characteristics of indoor RF multipath signals.  Measurements of received signal strength, angle of arrival, time of arrival, time difference of arrival and Doppler will be exploited, as appropriate, for each individual multipath signal element.

CWINS works on the analysis and modeling of the multipath and performance of traditional algorithms and Draper Laboratory works on algorithms exploiting multipath diversity.

Principal Investigators:

• Kaveh Pahlavan (CWINS)
• Robert Tingley (Draper Lab)

Research Staff (CWINS):

• Ahmad Hatami
• Mohammad Heidari
• Ferit Akgul

Sponsor: DARPA through a subcontract from Draper Laboratory

Duration: Started March 2005

Publications:

• Ahmad Hatami, PhD, 2006, Application of Channel Modeling for Indoor Localization Using TOA and RSS.
• A. Hatami, B. Alavi, K. Pahlavan, and M. Kanaan, "A Comparative Performance Evaluation of Indoor Geolocation Technologies," submitted to Interdisciplinary Information Sciences, Japan, 2006.
• K. Pahlavan, F. Akgul, M. Heidari, A. Hatami, J. Elwell, and R. Tingley" Indoor Geolocation in the Absence of Direct Path", Accepted for publication in IEEE Wireless Communications Magazine, 2006.
• A. Hatami, and K. Pahlavan, "Hybrid TOA-RSS Based Localization Using Neural Networks," Proceedings of IEEE Globecom, 2006, San Francisco, USA, 27 Nov. – 1 Dec. 2006.
• A. Hatami and K. Pahlavan, "Performance Comparison of RSS and TOA Indoor Geolocation Based on UWB Measurement of Channel Characteristics," 17th Annual IEEE International Symposium on Personal Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications (PIMRC’06), Helsinki, Finland, 11-14 Sept. 2006.
• M. Heidari and K. Pahlavan, "A Model for Dynamic Behavior of Ranging Errors in TOA-based Indoor Geolocation Systems," 64th Semiannual IEEE Vehicular Technology Conference, IEEE-VTC, fall 2006, Montréal, Canada, September 25-28, 2006.
• A. Hatami, K. Pahlavan, M. Heidari, and F. Akgul, "On RSS and TOA based Indoor Geolocation − A Comparative Performance Evaluation," IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC 2006), Las Vegas, USA, April 3-6, 2006.
• A. Hatami and K. Pahlavan, "Comparative statistical analysis of indoor positioning using empirical data and indoor radio channel models," Consumer communications and networking conference, IEEE CCNC 2006.