Wide Area Indoor Positioning: Block, City, and County Approaches

As usual debatable, the difference between a building and a block is here dictated by the fact that the deterioration of the positioning increases with the distance covered (accelerometer) or with the range (local radio). Very high quality equipment can reach very high positioning performances, but average ones fit quite well with this chapter.This chapter also deals with the so‐called “long‐range” positioning systems. The problem we have to face is linked to the indoor environments (remember this is a book about indoor positioning). The selected technologies are radio based and are all in the telecommunication domain. Nevertheless, they have not been designed for positioning purposes and the usual dichotomy still exists: for positioning purposes, one needs to detect the first signal that arrives (assuming line‐of‐sight propagation), whereas for telecommunication purposes, multipath are an opportunity. Thus, the performance of these technologies is very poor outdoors, and even worse indoors. Note that in addition to the poor accuracy, the reliability is also at a very low level. One of the only advantages of these techniques is the reduced number of transmitters required.