Architectures for location data acquisition and distribution in UWB indoor tracking systems

Ultra-wideband radio technology is one of the most promising technologies for indoor Location & Tracking applications, allowing the development of combined data transmission and location networks. But UWB faces important challenges due to its short range, which entails the need of a high number of fixed reference nodes, and limited data rate, which limits the amount of mobile nodes that can be tracked and the frequency of position updates. Therefore, suitable network architectures must be used and the amount of resources used for localization must be carefully evaluated. In this paper, different tracking system architectures are proposed and evaluated, as well as different strategies for the acquisition and distribution of location information. Other design parameters as the number of anchor nodes used for location, the anchor selection method and the position update rate are also discussed.