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Indoor Location Technologies

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 Contents

Introduction 3 
Time of Flight (TOF) 3 
Angle of Arrival (AOA) 4 
Signal Strength 4 
Conclusion 5 

Date
Introduction
Locations based services (LBS) lately have
been rapidly gaining in popularity since the
advent of smart phones. LBS applications
have become more capable with time and
are demanding more location accuracy and
indoor capability. Some of the newer LBS
applications such as Checkins, Friend
Finder, Proximity Promotions/Advertising,
etc. are more attractive for indoor type
environment. Thus the need for indoor
location accuracy is expected to accelerate
in the future.
The outdoor GPS based LBS ecosystems
are generally supported by four broad
categories of players. The first of course
are the infrastructure providers – which
happens to be the US government for GPS,
Russian Government for GLONASS, EU
for Galileo. The second type of players are
the GPS receiver makers and their silicon
component providers. The third type of
players provide the cartographic or map
related data. The final category of players
are the application developers. It is of
course possible to have overlap among the
different category of players.
The first killer LBS application was the
GPS based navigation devices that started
appearing in the mid 90s. Since then, this
application has been miniaturized into
handsets by the relentless march of
Moore’s Law. GPS essentially has three
primary components – the satellites, the
ground station that manages the satellites,
and the receivers. The satellite
infrastructure and ground stations are
managed by government and both are
highly complex operations. The receiver is
the area of commercialization. GPS works
wonderfully outdoors. However GPS
signal is not able to penetrate into most
indoor areas, and even when it is available,
the signal is very weak (e.g. -125 dBm vs
-75 dBm for Wifi vs -105 dBm for UMTS).
The satellites are very far away; about
33,000 miles from the earth’s surface. In
space, radiation from a transmitter follows
the inverse square law - signal strength goes
down by inverse square of the distance.
Which implies signal strength goes down by
4 times when the distance is doubled. The
weak signal requires substantial amplification
and processing on the handset. This is
anecdotally evident in the energy
consumption and subsequent warming when
GPS is enabled on a handset. The lack of
access to GPS indoors calls for a non-GPS
solution and infrastructure.
A number of different technologies are being
tried to solve the indoor location problem
economically. The most popular and
advanced technologies at this point are based
on the use of radio-frequency (RF) signals.
This paper describes the basics of RF based
localization.
Time of Flight (TOF)
Time of flight methods measure the time
light ( RF and light are both electromagnetic
waves) takes to travel from the transmitter to
the receiver. As the speed of light is constant
in space and air, the product of the time of
flight by the speed of light results in the
distance. In 3D, the determination of distance
would locate the receiver on the surface of a
sphere centered on the transmitter. Hence to
arrive at a point, at least three such distance
measurements need to be made.
The speed of light is 300,000 km per second,
which translates to about 0.33 meter per
nano-second (ns). That places a very
stringent requirement on the clocks used in
various parts of the system. For 1 meter
accuracy, an accurate and stable clock of
333 Mhz and 3 ppb ( parts per billion) is
mandated. Most smartphones these days have
a 1 Ghz CPU, but has clock stability of
only about 10 ppm ( parts per million).
There are a number of different derivates
of the basic TOF method – Time of Arrival
(TOA), Time Difference of Arrival
(TDOA), Round Trip Time (RTT) to
mention a few.
In TOA, the receiver and transmitter clocks
are synchronized and just by looking at the
timestamp of when the wave was
transmitted and when it was received, it is
possible to determine the distance. In
reality, it is very expensive to have
perfectly synchronized clocks, hence a
TDOA receiver is used in GPS. TDOA
measures the difference in time of arrival
from two or more synchronized
transmitters. The receiver is not
synchronized. This therefore requires one
additional measurement to arrive at the
location using a fourth satellite for GPS tri-
lateration. In RTT, the round trip travel
time between two points is measured. The
points exchange the timestamp of receipt
and transmit of radio waves based on their
local clocks.
Angle of Arrival (AOA)
In AOA, a radio beam is somehow focused
into a narrow cone and rotated in time,
around a center. Thus at different times, the
beam points to different directions and
illuminates different parts of a spherical
surface. Hence if a listening receiver notes
the time at which it is detecting the beam,
then it can determine the direction to the
transmitter. To arrive at a point in 3D
requires at least two measurements from
two transmitters, if the beams are rotated
in every direction of a sphere. The two
measurements result in two infinite lines
passing through the transmitters. The
intersection of these two lines is the point
of interest. In reality, the lines are cones
with significant width. The intersection of
the two cones results in a volume around the
point of intersection of their axes. There are
two primary ways of generating narrow
beams of radio signals –directional antennas
and phased arrays. Directional antennas are
static passive devices that need to be
mounted on some form of a turret to rotate.
Phased array antennas require electronics to
generate phase delayed signals to be fed to
the array. Just by changing the relative
phases, the direction of the beam can be
changed. The benefit of the AOA approach
is that it does not require expensive accurate
clock synchronization. However, focusing a
beam narrowly requires expensive antennas
and electronics. Moreover, in general the
narrower a beam is, the larger the size of the
antenna. Furthermore, the cone of the beam
widens as it travels further from the
transmitter, and hence accuracy deteriorates
linearly with distance.
Cell tower based radio location generally
uses AOA methods, as they have sectorized
and beam-forming antennas.
Signal Strength
Signal strength is a function of distance from
the transmitter. In free space, signal strength
falls off quadratically with distance. Hence
by knowing the strength at a point and
comparing that with the strength at a known
reference point, it is possible to estimate the
distance. As in the case of TOF, knowing the
distance from a number of transmitters
enables us to readily solve for the location.
The benefit of this method is that signal
strength measurement is readily available in
all communications channels (e.g. WiFi,
UMTS, WiMax, etc) and can be readily
leveraged. The measured value is usually
known as the Received Signal Strength
Indicator (RSSI) and is measured on every
frame. In case of Wifi , the RSSI is usually
measured by the silicon during the pre-
defined preamble period of the frame.
However due to multipath, obstruction,
reflection, scattering, etc., signal strength necessary to deploy an alternative
is a notoriously error prone number to infrastructure. Three basic types of radio
measure consistently. Furthermore, due to locationing technologies exist and all three
the quadratic nature of the fall-off signal have been deployed in some derived form
strength with distance, the ability to discern for a number of practical and beneficial
distances also falls off rapidly. The usages.
distance accuracy is the derivate and hence
is inverse cubic in nature. The ability to
discern thus goes down by 8 times, when Please send your questions or comments to
the distance is doubled. Polarization of the info@izspot.com.
signal also plays a significant role in signal
strength. Due to polarization, depending on
the orientation of the receiver, the receiver
would collect different amount of energy at
the same point and thus result in reading a
different signal strength.

Another incarnation of the Signal Strength

method is known as Finger Printing. The
basis for this method is that the signal
strength from a number of transmitters can
be measured at every point and that
constitutes a unique identification or
fingerprint of that location. The advantage
of this method is that it does require
complex modeling of radio wave
propagation. The disadvantage of course is
the survey that is required to be completed
for every location.

It is possible to mix and match a number of

the above techniques to develop proprietary
methods for indoor locations. Such hybrid
methods are usually used to optimize for
cost and scalability for a desired accuracy.

Conclusion
Radio based locating techniques have been
in use since late 1800s and have matured to
the point where a number of successful
usages have been made – GPS, RADAR,
etc. GPS is a wonderful technology for
outdoor open environment where the sky is
readily visible with 4 or more satellites in
view. However due to unavailability of
GPS in most indoor locations, it is