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Analysis of the Scalability of UWB Indoor Localization Solutions for High User Densities

Radio frequency (RF) technologies are often used to track assets in indoor environments. Among others, ultra-wideband (UWB) has constantly gained interest thanks to its capability to obtain typical errors of 30 cm or lower, making it more accurate than other wireless technologies such as WiFi, which...

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Autores principales: Ridolfi, Matteo, Van de Velde, Samuel, Steendam, Heidi, De Poorter, Eli
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2018
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6022048/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29880784
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s18061875
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author Ridolfi, Matteo
Van de Velde, Samuel
Steendam, Heidi
De Poorter, Eli
author_facet Ridolfi, Matteo
Van de Velde, Samuel
Steendam, Heidi
De Poorter, Eli
author_sort Ridolfi, Matteo
collection PubMed
description Radio frequency (RF) technologies are often used to track assets in indoor environments. Among others, ultra-wideband (UWB) has constantly gained interest thanks to its capability to obtain typical errors of 30 cm or lower, making it more accurate than other wireless technologies such as WiFi, which normally can predict the location with several meters accuracy. However, mainly due to technical requirements that are part of the standard, conventional medium access strategies such as clear channel assessment, are not straightforward to implement. Since most scientific papers focus on UWB accuracy improvements of a single user, it is not clear to which extend this limitation and other design choices impact the scalability of UWB indoor positioning systems. We investigated the scalability of indoor localization solutions, to prove that UWB can be used when hundreds of tags are active in the same system. This paper provides mathematical models that calculate the theoretical supported user density for multiple localization approaches, namely Time Difference of Arrival (TDoA) and Two-Way Ranging (TWR) with different MAC protocol combinations, i.e., ALOHA and TDMA. Moreover, this paper applies these formulas to a number of realistic UWB configurations to study the impact of different UWB schemes and settings. When applied to the 802.15.4a compliant Decawave DW1000 chip, the scalability dramatically degrades if the system operates with uncoordinated protocols and two-way communication schemes. In the best case scenario, UWB DW1000 chips can actively support up to 6171 tags in a single domain cell (no handover) with well-selected settings and choices, i.e., when adopting the combination of TDoA (one-way link) and TDMA. As a consequence, UWB can be used to simultaneously localize thousands of nodes in a dense network. However, we also show that the number of supported devices varies greatly depending on the MAC and PHY configuration choices.
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spelling pubmed-60220482018-07-02 Analysis of the Scalability of UWB Indoor Localization Solutions for High User Densities Ridolfi, Matteo Van de Velde, Samuel Steendam, Heidi De Poorter, Eli Sensors (Basel) Article Radio frequency (RF) technologies are often used to track assets in indoor environments. Among others, ultra-wideband (UWB) has constantly gained interest thanks to its capability to obtain typical errors of 30 cm or lower, making it more accurate than other wireless technologies such as WiFi, which normally can predict the location with several meters accuracy. However, mainly due to technical requirements that are part of the standard, conventional medium access strategies such as clear channel assessment, are not straightforward to implement. Since most scientific papers focus on UWB accuracy improvements of a single user, it is not clear to which extend this limitation and other design choices impact the scalability of UWB indoor positioning systems. We investigated the scalability of indoor localization solutions, to prove that UWB can be used when hundreds of tags are active in the same system. This paper provides mathematical models that calculate the theoretical supported user density for multiple localization approaches, namely Time Difference of Arrival (TDoA) and Two-Way Ranging (TWR) with different MAC protocol combinations, i.e., ALOHA and TDMA. Moreover, this paper applies these formulas to a number of realistic UWB configurations to study the impact of different UWB schemes and settings. When applied to the 802.15.4a compliant Decawave DW1000 chip, the scalability dramatically degrades if the system operates with uncoordinated protocols and two-way communication schemes. In the best case scenario, UWB DW1000 chips can actively support up to 6171 tags in a single domain cell (no handover) with well-selected settings and choices, i.e., when adopting the combination of TDoA (one-way link) and TDMA. As a consequence, UWB can be used to simultaneously localize thousands of nodes in a dense network. However, we also show that the number of supported devices varies greatly depending on the MAC and PHY configuration choices. MDPI 2018-06-07 /pmc/articles/PMC6022048/ /pubmed/29880784 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s18061875 Text en © 2018 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Article
Ridolfi, Matteo
Van de Velde, Samuel
Steendam, Heidi
De Poorter, Eli
Analysis of the Scalability of UWB Indoor Localization Solutions for High User Densities
title Analysis of the Scalability of UWB Indoor Localization Solutions for High User Densities
title_full Analysis of the Scalability of UWB Indoor Localization Solutions for High User Densities
title_fullStr Analysis of the Scalability of UWB Indoor Localization Solutions for High User Densities
title_full_unstemmed Analysis of the Scalability of UWB Indoor Localization Solutions for High User Densities
title_short Analysis of the Scalability of UWB Indoor Localization Solutions for High User Densities
title_sort analysis of the scalability of uwb indoor localization solutions for high user densities
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6022048/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29880784
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s18061875
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