The main objective of WHERE is to combine wireless communications and navigation for the benefit of future mobile radio systems. The impact will be manifold, such as real time localization knowledge in B3G/4G systems which increase the cellular capacity. GPS as well as the upcoming European Satellite Navigation System Galileo will be supplemented with techniques that improve accuracy andavailability of indoor navigation and location based service coverage. To enable ubiquitous mobile network access and to increase data rates, scientific and technological development is more and more focusing on the integration of radio access networks (RANs). This allows an efficient use even if the radio access technology behind such networks is dynamically changing. The knowledge of the position of mobile terminals is for an efficient usage of RANs valuable information in order to allocate resources or even to predict theallocation within a heterogeneous RAN infrastructure.
Example to improve localization with the help of communication nodes:In the following we show an example of how peer-to-peer communication between mobile terminals allows to exchange positioning information to improve the localization accuracy for the terminals. Mobile terminals are only able to perform loose estimation of their position. The estimation of the mobile’s own position can be done by GPS if the conditions are good. This means the signal is received by at least four satellites with line of sight conditions. Such conditions are hardly ever present in urban canyons. On the other hand multiple mobiles are in immediate vicinity. The mobiles can easily exchange their own positioning estimation directly through peer-to-peer links (even with multi-hop links). The cooperative exchange of positioning information allows a hybrid evaluation of all the loose positioning information faster and with higher accuracy. The WHERE project will develop and evaluate algorithms to implement cooperative positioning in different wireless system standards. A special focus will be on the required data rate and battery power consumption.
Positioning aiding Communications
Example to improve communications with positioning information:Mobile radio users may experience much higher data rates in isolated small cells (for example Wi-Fi hot-spot cells) than in much bigger macro cells of wide-area cellular systems (e.g., 3GPP/LTE cells). It seems beneficial that such hot spot cells offering higher data rates are available. However, there is no benefit of a hand-over if the dwell time of the mobile user in the hot-spot cell is less than the time the hand-over requires. If the mobile’s velocity is low the dwell time is long enough to exploit the high data rates by executing a hand-over to the hot-spot cell.The WHERE project develops algorithms that use mobility and positioning information of the mobile terminals to optimize the transfer of data streams in a heterogenous network.
Partners
Aalborg UniversityAdvanced Communications Research&Development S.A.Commissariat à L’Energie Atomique – LETIInstitut EurécomSiradelUniversité de Rennes 1Instituto TelecomunicaçõesMitsubishi Electric ITESigint Solutions Ltd.University of SurreyUniversidad Politécnica de MadridUniversity of AlbertaCity University of Hong Kong