Location-aware wireless networks

The availability of positional information is of great importance in numerous commercial, health-care, public safety, and military applications. The coming years will see the emergence of high-definition location-aware (HDLA) networks with sub-meter accuracy, minimal infrastructure, and robustness in harsh environments. We propose to realize this ambitious goal using cooperative peer-to-peer algorithms. This talk will present a brief technical overview of our recent activities with particular emphasis on cooperative localization in wideband wireless networks from three points of view: fundamental performance bounds, cooperative algorithms, and experimentation. Fundamental bounds serve as performance benchmarks and as guidelines for network design. Cooperative algorithms will be designed to approach these bounds, resulting in dramatic performance improvements over traditional techniques. Experimentation will be used to determine important attributes of physical environments; these realistic models are necessary to obtain accurate bounds, to develop robust algorithms, and to validate their performance in harsh environment.