MIT researchers are developing a theoretical framework that could eventually be used to help pinpoint the location of mobile devices ? represented here as blue dots ? indoors, where GPS reception can be unreliable and inaccurate.
Graphic: Christine Daniloff
In a pair of papers appearing in October in the journal IEEE Transactions on Information Theory , MIT researchers present a new theory that establishes fundamental limits on the accuracy of wireless location detection. By demonstrating which aspects of wireless signals convey the most reliable location information, the work points the way toward better location-detection algorithms. In the last 10 years, the possibility of using wireless connections to deduce mobile devices? locations has been a hot research topic in industry and academia. GPS systems frequently fail in large buildings, and even when they don't, they're not very precise. Firefighters tracking each other in a smoke-filled building, soldiers trying to determine each other's position in urban environments, medical staff trying to locate equipment or each other in a busy hospital, and warehouse workers trying to find merchandise in an aisle of pallets stacked 20 feet high all need higher-resolution location information than GPS can provide. Heavy hitters like Google, Intel and Nokia have all experimented with wireless localization, but MIT's Wireless Communications and Network Sciences Group in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) is taking a more fundamental approach to the problem. In the new papers, Moe Win, a professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics who heads the group, graduate student Yuan Shen, and former postdoc Henk Wymeersch analyze networks in which wireless devices are working together to determine their locations. The researchers derive fundamental limits on the accuracy of the networks?
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