Grant: Alliance Grants

The goal of this partnership is to study several challenges related to locating objects in indoor environments, using Ericsson's radio dot system (RDS), a system which has been designed to provide fast and reliable 5G cellular service inside buildings. The research will seek two objectives, mostly in parallel. The first direction involves tracking the location of a 5G-enabled wireless transmitter in an indoor environment, while the second tracks changes to the positions of non-transmitting objects. Locating and tracking a transmitter will be accomplished by accurately detecting the times at which a transmitted reference signal is received at each of the distributed antennas in the RDS. Based on the speed of light, the known positions of the receive antennas, and the relative times of arrival of the transmitted signal at those antennas, it is theoretically possible to accurately determine the location of the transmitter. For this to be successful, very accurate estimation of the time of arrival must be achieved, which is one of the primary research objectives. Tracking movement of a non-transmitting object is more of a challenge, one that may potentially be addressed by borrowing techniques employed by radar systems. In particular, a deterministic reference signal (not necessarily a signal defined in the 5G standard) will be transmitted from one of the RDS antennas. After bouncing around the building, reflected by both stationary and non-stationary objects, the signals received at each of the other RDS antennas will be captured. By comparing changes to the captured signals over time, it is theoretically possible to estimate the location and relative movement of a non-stationary object, and even hopefully classify the type of object. Additional objectives of this project include assisting Ericsson Canada in providing enhanced value-added services to telecom service providers, training highly-qualified personnel for future employment in Ericsson Canada's research labs, and increasing industry/academic collaboration to ensure that academic outcomes are directly applicable to meet the needs of Ericsson. This project will help maintain Canada's leadership in the telecommunication industry.