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MAIN DATA

This course is taught as part of the UPM-SSR Master on Communication Technologies and Systems.

Practicalities for the 2013-2014 2nd semester: contact Prof. Gonzalo de Miguel. 

MOTIVATION

The next generation of mobile and ambient services is presumed to be highly adaptive to the user’s personal features and to his environmental, physical and technological condition and subsequent consequences. This ‘context-aware paradigm’, which originates from the vision of ‘ubiquitous computing’ and is supposed to drive the design of future commercial mobile services, still presents a lot of technological, social and business challenges. This course faces some (few) of these (many) open issues, in particular those related to the computation and management of a relevant descriptor of context, which is location. Nowadays, when mobile and wireless networks are increasingly spreading (and enhancing their self-configuration and self-healing capabilities) and sensors are being miniaturized and integrated in mobile devices, the coordinated use of all these technologies may improve the completeness, reliability, continuity and availability of position information.

Thus the objective of the course is to provide a unified and complete vision on the mathematical tools that are needed to solve the localization problem, together with a reference to the main technologies enabling positioning in different scenarios (indoors and outdoors). Additionally, a review of location based services, both in pre-commercial or commercial state is given.

By the end of the course, the student will:

1. know the different type of localization methods, based on signal strength measurements, delays and angle of arrival.

2. be aware of the different problems of each methods, and of the criteria to be used in order to solve a given practical problem.

3. know the mathematical fundamentals of the localization problem.

4. be able to characterize a localization system, by modeling errors and accuracy.

5. know the main localization technologies and their commercial state, and their applications.

Summing up, the student will be able to analyze and solve a localization problem by using the available technological proposals.

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