BSBL-Based Auxiliary Vehicle Position Analysis in Smart City Using Distributed MEC and UAV-Deployed IoT

Smart city enters the new 3.0 era, and Internet of Things (IoT) perform as the urban neural network in smart city. In the industrial areas of smart city, the IoT focuses on industrial applications, such as logistics and environmental monitoring. In this work, an auxiliary position analysis framework composed of IoT and distributed mobile-edge computing (MEC) is proposed to analyze the position of vehicles in the industrial areas of smart city. In the proposed framework, IoT are deployed by multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) equipped with uniform linear array (ULA), which receives the signal emitted by vehicles for obtaining the direction of arrival (DOA), and the distributed MEC provides computing and synchronization services to auxiliary positioning. The DOA estimation is a key issue for auxiliary positioning in the proposed framework. To realize DOA estimation with unknown mutual coupling (MC) existing in IoT nodes, a novel block sparse Bayesian learning (SBL) algorithm is developed. In the developed algorithm, the unknown MC existing between sensors in each IoT nodes is first fused with the signal by parameterizing steering vector. Then, a block SBL (BSBL) procedure is presented to perform DOA estimation by using the inherent block sparse structure in the equivalent signal obtained after fusion. Benefiting from the fusion of MC and signal, the developed DOA estimation algorithm does not require a separate estimation of the unknown MC and also does not cause the loss of the array aperture. Based on the DOA estimation information, the position of vehicles in the industrial environment is effectively analyzed through weighted multiple cross-locations. Synthetic data set simulation is carried out to verify that the vehicle positions in smart city can be efficiently analyzed and estimated based on the presented framework and algorithm.