Indoor Geolocation Science for 4G Wireless Information Networks
PI: Kaveh Pahlavan
Personnel: Xinrong Li, Jacques Beneat
Sponsored by NSF

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 extend 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:

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.


Multipath radio channel characteristics for telecommunication and geolocation applications