Background
Position location technology has become increasingly important to a very broad spectrum of industry sectors, from transportation to healthcare, where accurate position location is desired under diverse circumstances. GPS is effective and accurate outdoors but works very poorly, if at all, indoors and in complex urban environments due to severe signal blockage and reflection. GPS is also vulnerable to jamming and other disruptions from both man-made and natural causes. Mobile cellular networks can be used but have limited accuracy to several hundred metres. Position location through a wireless local area network (LAN) can provide some performance improvement over a cellular phone network but is only applicable within the service area of the network.
Description of the Invention
Our integrated wireless system supports locationing, tracking and communication concurrently. It is suitable for local and indoor location based applications with improved accuracy, flexibility and security over the current alternatives. By incorporating cooperative signal processing techniques into a network of communicating nodes, high speed two-way communication between locationing nodes and users can be realized at the same time. The system is comprised of a master transmitting node and at least two slave nodes as reference points, with an unlimited number of user devices. Another major advantage of this system is its self-calibration capability, which simplifies the deployment procedure. It supports mobility of both reference nodes and user devices, which dramatically improves its application potential in complex industry environments.
Potential Advantages
• Enable accurate locationing in complex environments
• Allows both position location, tracking and two-way communication with individual users
• Suitable for 'deploy and use' applications
• Dynamic network operation
Potential Industries
• Location-based advertising
• Healthcare
• Fleet management
• People or asset tracking
• Building/factory automation
Patent Status
• US patent issued as 8,823,589.
