He LOST-Heliplat LOcalization SysTem based on smart antennas technology

Safety has been in the past decade the primary motivation for civilian mobile position location. Besides, another promising development field for wireless localization lies in the Intelligent Transportation Systems and, in the deployment of location-specific services which carriers are interested to provide to the market of mobile subscribers. We address a complete, autonomous, and movable-on-demand localization system based on the estimation of the direction of arrival of radio-signals emitted by mobile sources in unknown position and impinging on an array of sensors placed on board of a stratospheric platform. The most attractive characteristic of the proposed system is its inherent mobility, which allows its employment in emergency conditions, or in all those situations where the wireless network infrastructures are not present or are unable to properly operate for localization. Furthermore, it can be intended as a backup system in case of temporary unavailability of the GPS service for some user, and for all those users not equipped with specific localization instruments. Preliminary simulation results prove that the system can be accurate enough to fulfill the E-911 precision requirements.