Low-power Advanced Positioning Systems Under Study – LAPSUS

This project aims at answering the following research questions: can very low power devices be localized with an acceptable precision for years without changing (or recharging) the feeding battery through Long Range Wide Area Networks instead of Global Navigation Satellite Systems? What is the capacity of such a system? Is this solution viable for tracking mobile devices? Such questions are motivated by the need to locate people, animals and objects, equipped with a very low power radio transceiver. Indeed, GNSS-enabled devices continuously idle listen to satellite signals, leading to a complete discharge of batteries in a short time. Recently, the LoRaWAN network infrastructure has been proposed as a working solution to leverage very low power transmitter localization at the cost of a coarse-grained positioning resolution. This has been done through trilateration based on Time Difference Of Arrival and by exploiting GNSS timing for synchronization purposes. However, to overcome possible service outages or breakdowns of GNSS, a wise approach is to leverage a truly GNSS-free LoRaWAN-based positioning system. The first scientific objective is to ensure the maximum achievable positioning precision. Then, this project aims at maximizing the capacity of such system configuration. More ambitiously, this project will investigate how to trade-off positioning precision for a higher ability to track mobile low power devices. The envisaged project methodology will be based on a deductive approach: theoretical results will be tested primarily against evidence coming from experimental setup. For the sake of scalability, the knowledge acquired from experiments will also be used to mimic realistic deployments in a LoRaWAN simulator hosted at LAAS-CNRS, and to assess the performances of large network scenarios. This project will be instrumental to let the research area on true GNSS-free low power localization become more visible and emerge in the scientific community. In this sense, the theoretical aspects developed through LAPSUS will be general enough to be applied with and beyond LoRa. Low power GNSS-denied localization can be achieved also through short range technologies, thus potentially enabling low power localization in dense urban areas and even for indoor positioning systems.