Can you find me now?
In the last 10 years, the possibility of using wireless connections to deduce mobile devices’ locations has been a hot research topic in industry and academia. GPS systems frequently fail in large buildings, and even when they don’t, they’re not very precise. Firefighters tracking each other in a smoke-filled building, soldiers trying to determine each other’s position in urban environments, medical staff trying to locate equipment or each other in a busy hospital, and warehouse workers trying to find merchandise in an aisle of pallets stacked 20 feet high all need higher-resolution location information than GPS can provide.Heavy hitters like Google, Intel and Nokia have all experimented with wireless localization, but MIT’s Wireless Communications and Network Sciences Group in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) is taking a more fundamental approach to the problem. The lab is developing a theoretical framework that explains just how accurate wireless location...