Design of an indoor positioning test system

GPS has during the last decade revolutionized the way we navigate and get information. Unfortunately GPS does not work well indoor. This is a major drawback now when consumers use applications that require positioning information and expect them to work everywhere. Ask your self how many times you have been irritated that your positioning service on your mobile phone does not work when you sit in your sofa. During the last years it has been an intensive discussion in the positioning world on how to solve this. Several solutions exist, however one very promising is IEEE 802.15.4a. It is a standard based on impulse radio. The advantage with this standard is that it is possible to get very high position accuracy, down to centimeter level. It is also very cheap and quite robust against multipath reflections. The IEEE 802.15.4 is also specified for very low cost short distance communication. The standard with extension “a” was released in 2007 and soon the first chips will enter the market. In a couple of year this will hopefully lead to a large amount of new applications, building on the high accuracy and the possibility for indoor positioning.

In the thesis work you will design a measurement equipment to be able to understand real environmental effects in IEEE 802.15.4a radio transmission. The budget for the test equipment is quite limited so you need to design some parts like mixers, amplifiers and filters your self. However active components is often possible to buy with evaluation boards, giving you the task only to evaluate performance. When the equipment is design you will evaluate radio transmission effects in a real environment.

Content of the thesis
- Literature study on ultra wide band positioning systems
- Make a system design for the measurement system. Consider signal power levels, noise figure and in/out band performance.
- Purchase used instruments with the right performance and price.
- Design passive filter, mixers, amplifier and antenna. You will use some electronics design tool.
- Order and build the designed boards. Fine tune the designed boards.
- Write VHDL code for a FPGA evaluation board to generate high speed pulses.
- Integrate the complete system
- Evaluate the system performance and make a measurement accuracy analysis
- Make practical measurements in a real indoor environment to evaluate radio transmission effects.
- Write report

Key competence
- Radio electronics design
- Analog electronics design
- Electromagnetic field theory, antenna design
- Knowledge in some electronics design tool, both schematics and layout
- Signal processing
- VHDL programming