WPNC’19

As the number of applications in IoT, Industry 4.0 and Mobility 4.0 continues to grow, pushing localization, tracking and navigation technologies further and further in penetration to unprecedentedly large scales over both time and space, a new paradigm shift awaits to make its impact, and that is the decreasing gap between the constraints faced by wireless communications and positioning systems.

To elaborate, most wireless systems today are data-oriented, and therefore are designed to deliver relatively long sequences of packets with payload significantly longer than overhead information, to a single access point (at uplink).

With the explosion of scale expected to occur with the deployment of the IoT (both consumer and industrial) and of connected vehicles, future wireless systems will, however, become increasingly connectivity-oriented, relying on shorter packets and multi-point access, much like the majority of localization networks are by nature.

Furthermore, under the pressure of ever-scarcer frequency resources, wireless systems are set to move decidedly to higher frequency bands (including millimeter wave and visible light), bringing to the design table, once again, challenges that are well-known by the localization community.

The result of this process of approximation is that a stronger cross-breeding between wireless localization and wireless communication systems will both be possible and likely. This trend is in fact already observed in the increasing body of work both on location-based parameterization and optimization of wireless systems, as well as on localization systems designed for mmWave and visible light wireless platforms. In light of the above, the theme for WPNC’19 will be Localization, Tracking and Communications in large scales. Some topics of interest are highlighted below.