Alok Mandloi Review of The Cricket - Location support system

UF-id 13183337

The Cricket is a location support system designed for indoor localization of mobile node/receiver to the granularity of a portion (4x4 feet) of room using self contained decentralized transmitter nodes consisting of radio frequency (RF) and ultrasonic sound (US) transmitters. The main goals met by the Cricket system are: a) Indoor localization without compromising privacy of user b) De-centralized administration for scalable system c) Low cost by using off the shelf components d) Granularity of detecting portion of room e) Supporting devices using different networks i.e. network heterogeneity The basic idea of the system is that various transmitter nodes known as beacons would be mounted on ceilings of rooms. Each of these beacons would transmit RF signal and US sound at the same instant. The authors mention that a system of using only RF signals does not work because of many metal objects are present indoors which cause difficulty in predicting the location of receiver nodes. RF signals travel at speed of light and US signals travel at speed of sound. The RF signal reaches the receiver (known as listener) before the US signal. With the difference in the arrival times of RF and US the approximate distance of the listener can be determined by the listener without referring a central database, thus protecting the user privacy. Each beacon transmits a unique id and location string. Signals from multiple beacons in a room could interfere at the listener if their signal strengths are almost same. A centralized system, which coordinates the transmission from the beacons, could be used to prevent transmission overlaps but it would add administrative overhead. Instead an innovative solution of using randomized transmission by each beacon uniformly distributed within an interval of [150 ms, 350 ms], with an average frequency of 4 per second helps. This way overlap of transmission reduces drastically. To combat stray US sounds or RF signals the amount of time for which RF signal is transmitted is chosen such that, when the US sound is received at the listener the corresponding RF signal is still being transmitted by the transmitter. It is also observed that the placement of beacons equal distances from virtual/physical boundary could reduce the wrong location detection. Also the US transmitter on beacon should be at 45 to ceiling for better localization and avoiding stray US signals. Three algorithms for finding the nearest beacon were compared a) Majority - selecting beacon whose signal is most frequently received at receiver b) MinMean - selecting beacon with minimum mean distance calculated from multiple samples at listener. c) MinMode - selecting beacon with the minimum mode distance from the multiple samples received at listener Of these three it was found that the error rate is highest in Majority algorithm. The error rates of MinMode algorithm were the least and MinMean had a comparable but slightly higher error rate.

Alok Mandloi

UF-id 13183337

The Cricket system has been developed to combat the limitations of similar localization solutions developed in the past like The Bat system, Active Badge system and Radar system. Therefore it has been built with strong foundations. The scenarios in which interference or error could occur have been identified and suitable solutions for placement of beacons have been provided. Also since the system supports heterogeneous networks it could be implemented on various devices and have immense applications like Floorplan, Google indoor maps etc. The authors point out that they would use solar panels for future designs for the beacons so that they are self-contained. I doubt the feasibility of such a system reason being that Cricket has been designed for indoor localization and solar cells would not charge / work indoors. The experimental setup concentrates on a single listener. Analysis of the detection pattern for multiple listeners in a room also needs to be understood. Power consumed by the beacons is pointed out. It would be more important to analyze the power consumption of the listener since it would be mobile and have a limited power budget. The analysis of a mobile listener is not very comprehensive. Using the present location and rate of change of signal strengths, movement of the listener could also be predicted. The aim of the Cricket system is to find only the nearest beacon. Instead a more accurate location can be determined by using triangulation of signals from three different nodes. In the system mentioned a specialized hardware is required for the listener. But with the proliferation of smartphones in recent times they can be used as listeners. By using Bluetooth signals instead of RF and the normal US sound. This kind of system has been implemented in the GuoGuo project. The cost of beacons of $10 is lesser than similar implementations but is high enough to have a widespread implementation. A house needs around 20 beacons that would cost $ 200. Therefore the cost of the system needs to be reduced by a factor of 10 for widespread adoption. The initial setup of the beacons needs some amount of work. Instead a system could be developed which uses the signals received from other beacons to initialize its position. This way setup of location of only the first beacon would be required.