High-Accuracy Localization for Assisted Living: 5G systems will turn multipath channels from foe to friend

Abstract

Assisted living (AL) technologies, enabled by technical advances such as the advent of the Internet-of-Things, are increasingly gaining importance in our ageing society. This article discusses the potential of future high-accuracy localization systems as a key component of AL applications. Accurate location information can be tremendously useful to realize, e.g., behavioral monitoring, fall detection, and real-time assistance. Such services are expected to provide older adults and people with disabilities with more independence and thus to reduce the cost for caretaking.Total cost of ownership and ease of installation are paramount to make sensor systems for AL viable. In case of a radiobased indoor localization system, this implies that a conventional solution is unlikely to gain widespread adoption because of its requirement to install multiple fixed nodes (anchors) in each room. This paper therefore places its focus on (i) discussing radiolocalization methods that reduce the required infrastructure by exploiting information from reflected multipath components and (ii) showing that knowledge about the propagation environment enables localization with high accuracy and robustness. It is demonstrated that new millimeter-wave (mm-wave) technology, under investigation for 5G communications systems, will be able to provide cm-accuracy indoor localization in a robust manner, ideally suited for AL.

A Survey of Enabling Technologies for Network Localization, Tracking, and Navigation

“…The compressive sensing approach of [44] can facilitate such high accuracy in mmWave channels, as demonstrated through simulations. Centimeter-level accuracy was reported in [45] using mmWave MIMO channel measurements obtained by a vector network analyzer.…”

“…Authors in [44] exploit the sparsity of the mmWave channel, and employ a compressive sensing approach with iterative refinement steps for accurate estimation of the channel parameters, including the departure and arrival angles as well as the time-of-arrival for each observed propagation path, that can facilitate such high accuracy. A site-specific propagation model is used for indoor localization in 5G to exploit multipath in mmWave MIMO channels [45]. Along the same line, Channel-SLAM is a recursive Bayesian filtering approach that treats multipath components as signals emitted from virtual transmitters, thus leading to a more accurate position estimate or enabling positioning when the number of physical transmitters is insufficient [49].…”

Rao-Blackwellized Gaussian Sum Particle Filtering for Multipath Assisted Positioning

“…. , UKF do (9) perform UKF prediction and update to calculate x ⟨ , ,ℓ⟩ TX, using the UKF equations in the Appendix; (10) calculate the weight ⟨ , ,ℓ⟩ with (46) Note that the weights ⟨ ⟩ and ⟨ , ,ℓ⟩ in (45) and (46) of the user particles and the Gaussian components, respectively,…”

“…Multipath assisted positioning schemes have, for example, been applied in radar applications [7], using ultrawideband (UWB) [8,9] or 5G [10] systems and in cooperative systems [11].…”

IoT’s Tiny Steps towards 5G: Telco’s Perspective

“…A proposal of design guidelines in architectures and protocols for mmWave communications is presented in [42]. It is demonstrated that new mmWave technologies, which are under investigation for 5G communications systems, will be able to provide indoor centimeter (cm)-accuracy localization in a robust manner, ideally suited for Assisted Living (AL) [228].…”