Laboratory of Electronics and Communications Engineering, Tampere University of Technology, Korkeakoulunkatu 3, Tampere 33720, Finland.
Wirepas, Visiokatu 4, Tampere 33720, Finland.
Sensors (Basel). 2018 Jul 30;18(8):2470. doi: 10.3390/s18082470.
Connectivity solutions for the Internet of Things (IoT) aim to support the needs imposed by several applications or use cases across multiple sectors, such as logistics, agriculture, asset management, or smart lighting. Each of these applications has its own challenges to solve, such as dealing with large or massive networks, low and ultra-low latency requirements, long battery life requirements (i.e., more than ten years operation on battery), continuously monitoring of the location of certain nodes, security, and authentication. Hence, a part of picking a connectivity solution for a certain application depends on how well its features solve the specific needs of the end application. One key feature that we see as a need for future IoT networks is the ability to provide location-based information for large-scale IoT applications. The goal of this paper is to highlight the importance of positioning features for IoT applications and to provide means of comparing and evaluating different connectivity protocols in terms of their positioning capabilities. Our compact and unified analysis ends with several case studies, both simulation-based and measurement-based, which show that high positioning accuracy on low-cost low-power devices is feasible if one designs the system properly.
物联网 (IoT) 的连接解决方案旨在满足多个领域（如物流、农业、资产管理或智能照明）中多个应用程序或用例提出的需求。这些应用程序各自都有其需要解决的挑战，例如处理大型或大规模网络、低和超低延迟要求、长电池寿命要求（即在电池上运行超过十年）、持续监测特定节点的位置、安全性和认证。因此，为特定应用选择连接解决方案的一部分取决于其功能如何很好地解决终端应用的特定需求。我们认为未来物联网网络的一个关键特性是提供大规模物联网应用的基于位置的信息的能力。本文的目的是强调定位功能对于物联网应用的重要性，并提供比较和评估不同连接协议在定位能力方面的方法。我们的简洁统一分析以几个案例研究结束，包括基于仿真和基于测量的案例研究，这些研究表明，如果系统设计得当，在低成本低功耗设备上实现高精度定位是可行的。
