A Low-Cost Protocol and Application for UWB Localization

Started in April 2008, the EUWB (Coexisting Short Range Radio by Advanced Ultra-Wideband Radio Technology, FP7-ICT-215669, www.euwb.eu) project has been an industry-led initiative of twenty-one major industrial and excellent academic organizations from Europe and Israel who have been targeting innovative improvement, adaptation, integration and application of short-range Ultra-Wideband Radio Technology (UWB-RT). EUWB has effectively leveraged and significantly enhanced the scientific knowledge base in the advanced UWB-RT and has provided sophisticated new applications enabled by UWB and highly demanded in several European key industrial sectors such as home entertainment consumer electronics, automotive, public transportation, and heterogeneous cellular networks. It is anticipated that the efficient exploitation of cross-layer functionalities will fertilize the successful application of UWB technology. Within EUWB, major fields of this emerging challenge have been identified, such as the cognitive radio related Detect-And-Avoid (DAA) technology and the localization and tracking (LT) technology. An important aspect is to design an IT protocol. In this manuscript the authors will first illustrate the technical approach of EUWB, giving a brief overview of the project. Then, the authors will propose a novel IT protocol and application. This application is tailored to operate also with UWB devices that do not fully comply with the previously proposed LT schemes which need specific physical and medium access control layer functionalities.