This article was 1st published on our sister Site, The Internet Of All Things.
Mass. US, June 4, 2018: Anticipating a critical strain on the ability of fifth generation (5G) networks to keep track of a rapidly growing number of mobile devices, engineers at Tufts University have come up with an improved algorithm for localising and tracking these products that distributes the task among the devices themselves.
Image from Open Clip Art via
A post on the Tufts University Site said this is a scalable solution that could meet the demands of a projected 50 billion connected products in the Internet of Things (IoT) by 2020, and would enable a widening range of location-based services. The results of the Tufts study were published today in Proceedings of the IEEE, the leading peer-reviewed scientific journal published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
Currently, positioning of wireless devices is centralised, depending on “anchors” with known locations such as cell towers or GPS satellites to communicate directly with each device. As the number of devices increases, anchors must be installed at higher density. Centralised positioning can become unwieldy as the number of items to track grows significantly.
As an alternative to centralised solutions, the authors’ method of distributed localization in a 5G network has the devices locate themselves without all of them needing direct access to anchors. Sensing and calculations are done locally on the device, so there is no need for a central coordinator to collect and process the data.
The self-localization algorithm developed makes use of device-to-device communication, and so can take place indoors (e.g., in offices and manufacturing facilities), underground, underwater, or under thick Cloud cover. This is an advantage over GPS systems, which not only can go dark under those conditions, but also adds to the cost and power requirements of the device.
