BCAM Scientific Seminar: Network localization and navigation, a new opportunity in statistical communication theory

The availability of positional information is of extreme importance in numerous wireless applications including autonomous driving, assisted living, Internet-of-Things, crowdsensing, medical services, as well as search-and-rescue operations. The coming years will see the emergence of location- aware networks with sub-meter localization accuracy, minimal infrastructure, and high robustness in harsh (GPS challenged) environments. To reach this goal we advocate network localization and navigation, a new paradigm that exploits a combination of wideband transmission and spatiotemporal cooperation. Our work relies on statistical communication theory and has addressed this problem from three perspectives: theoretical framework, cooperative algorithms, and network experimentation. This talk will provide an overview of our recent research results in this exciting field.