Low Power Sensing, Communication, and Localization Using Emerging Radio Technologies

The aims of this project is to explore the applicability of emerging radio technologies such as newly introduced standards i.e. IEEE 802.15.4z Ultrawideband (UWB) PHY and other technologies such as 2.4GHz LoRa radio technologies for use with network communications protocols, secure ranging, localisation and passive sensing of objects and movements. The research aims leverage the improved properties of these radios to provide highly reliable services in harsh environments compared to the very well researched IEEE 802.15.4/BLE radios. One of the highly used technologies used in this research UWB has characteristics that allow it to provide high data rates, accurate time synchronisation and good resilience to multi-path fading as well as capable of fine ranging and localisation whilst making use of the a less crowded spectrum. Thanks to the readily available channel state information from the UWB impulse radios, passive sensing of environmental changes caused by movement of objects and humans is also possible. For 2.4GHz LoRa radios, the improved performance can come from its long range transmissions compared to BLE and Zigbee/802.15.4. Apart from leveraging the improved features, the work would look to exploit lightweight machine learning approaches that can be implemented on ARM Cortex-M family of microcontrollers.

Different methods and innovative designs would look to optimise the operation of communication protocols for example by learning about best links and communication schedules, enhance accuracy of passive (device free/non-cooperative) sensing of objects, humans and their activities as well as improving the ranging and localisation performance of the technologies.

Up until recently, Internet of Things deployments often rely on Bluetooth, Bluetooth Low Energy, IEEE 802.15.4 or WiFi radios for communication and localisation. The performance of these technologies can suffer greatly in environments where there are many other devices occupying the 2.4GHz frequency. Additionally these narrowband radios suffer greatly from multi-path fading in enclosed indoor environments which can lead to high probability of packet loss and significant inaccuracies for localisation (order of metres).

UWB being one the main technologies used in this PhD project, is a potentially good alternative to already available narrowband technologies in that it is inherently immune to multipath fading. As an impulse radio is also provides nanosecond time resolution so the first multi-path component can be clearly identified thus allowing for accurate ranging and reliable communication.

For prototyping and experimentation, the work will make use of commercial off the shelf radios along with open-source implementations of network protocols commonly used in IoT applications such as those frameworks provided by the Zephyr project or Contiki-NG open source projects. This work will engage with Toshiba units for exploitation of the produced technologies.

This project falls within the EPSRC Engineering research Area, "ICT Networks and Distributed Systems".