Daniel Fernández defended his Master thesis on “Tight hybridisation for positioning with GPS and WLAN” in the scope of the POSTIP-2 project

Published August 25, 2010

On 5th July Daniel Fernández of CTAE defended his Master’s thesis on the topic of “Tight hybridisation for positioning with GPS and WLAN”. Daniel scored the highest mark and thus obtained the telecommunications engineering degree from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC). The project was supervised by Dr. Francisco Barceló (Departament d’Enginyeria Telemàtica, UPC) and Dr. Marc Ciurana (CTAE), and developed in collaboration between both institutions in the scope of the CTAE project POSTIP-2. His work has been selected for oral presentation in the upcoming ENC-GNSS conference in Braunschweig, Germany.

The objective of POSTIP-2 was achieving a practical positioning method that combines WLAN and Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) signals in order to enhance the positioning availability in urban environments, keeping the location accuracy as close as possible to that provided by GNSS alone.

Despite the latest advances in GNSS high-sensitivity receivers for harsh environments, signal blocking caused by buildings makes it unfeasible to consider GNSS as an overall positioning solution to cover entirely outdoor urban areas. Recently, local authorities have deployed WLAN access points (WiFi, IEEE 802.11) on the streets of many cities in order to provide municipal services or wireless internet access. Moreover, the integration of GNSS and WLAN in a single device is now very common. Assuming a hybridisation at measurement level (i.e. tight coupling), a strong benefit could be expected since there is low correlation between the coverage patterns of the contributing systems.

Obtained results are very encouraging since they show that the achieved method is able to improve the positioning availability while maintaining an accuracy similar to standalone GPS in more than 75% of the test case scenarios.