3.5 High-Precision Wireless Localization

Recent developments in Ultra-Wideband (UWB) wireless communication enable wireless localization as a link between the digital and the physical world. With the technological advances, the achievable precision and accuracy is increased dramatically such that novel applications exploiting this precise cyber-physical link become feasible. Autonomous swarms of robots, precise and scalable tracking of goods or safety applications are within the reach of this potential. However, the increase in communication required for such capabilities to become feasible is constrained by bounds of channel utilization, energy consumption, and intelligent information distribution. Therefore, novel approaches for maximizing information and localization throughput while minimizing channel utilization and power consumption and maintaining precise localization results are crucial to overcoming technology barriers and ultimately enabling a connected cyber-physical world. Promising approaches are novel localization-specific protocols to coordinate channel access among localization targets in order to achieve reliable data rates while minimizing actual power consumption. Further, intelligent approaches are required to increase the achievable accuracy for these resource-efficient localization approaches such as Time-Difference of Arrival (TDOA). In those cases, additional parameters of the radio channel can be exploited to obtain quality indicators for measurement and mitigate outliers or generally improve the localization accuracy through adequate estimation. In the following, the requirements of several applications are analyzed, and an overview of the solution space in terms of channel utilization, energy efficiency, and accuracy is given. Based on these requirements, solution approaches are presented to improve both channel utilization and energy efficiency. Further, approaches to increase the achievable accuracy in challenging environments are illustrated and evaluated. It is shown that novel approaches for high-precision wireless localization enable novel applications by employing localization-specific protocols and methods to improve the accuracy despite challenging conditions.