Positioning for the cellular Internet of Things

Introduction

The trend towards an omnipresent Internet of Things (IoT) enables numerous applications such as smart metering, weather monitoring, or cargo tracking. While stationary applications usually require no position information any tracking application needs knowledge about its position. In particular for cellular IoT [1] there are 3 options to attain position information:

• Positioning using information provided by the cell (e.g. cell ID) using a large lookup table
• Network supported positioning: Observed Time Difference of Arrival (OTDOA) such as covered in Implementation of a NB-IoT Positioning System or OTDOA Positioning for LTE Cat-M
• Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) such as GPS

Project Description

This project will focus on the first point, positioning using information provided by the cell. While there exist a few commercial providers of cell ID based positioning services the goal of this project is to enhance existing open source services such as [2] with missing functionality. The tasks can cover

• Trianulation
• Encryption
• Positioning server software development

A pure implementation project or combined with algorithmic approaches is possible depending on the interest of the student(s).

Status: Available

Looking for 1-2 Semester/Master students

Contact: Benjamin Weber

Prerequisites

No specific requirements, open source enthusiast and general programming and scripting knowledge are a plus.

Character

10% Theory, Algorithms and Simulation

70% Implementation (various programming languages)

20% Measurements

Professor

Qiuting Huang

References

[1] 3GPP. Release 13. http://www.3gpp.org/release-13, 2016.

[2] An opencellid server using bottle and bottle-sqlalchemy. https://github.com/janjongboom/opencellid.git, 2018.