What is positioning and what are the common positioning technologies?

With the gradual maturity of the ecological chain of the Internet of Things, the demand for positioning in all walks of life has also increased greatly. Because GPS satellite signals can't be located indoors and are easily interfered by various radio signals, in order to realize the "last mile" indoor positioning service, most of the mainstream indoor positioning technologies at present rely on popular wireless communication technologies, such as Bluetooth technology, WiFi technology and ultra-wideband technology. Among them, Bluetooth positioning and UWB positioning are more mature. This paper mainly introduces the widely used Bluetooth indoor positioning technology and ultra-wideband indoor positioning technology.

First, Bluetooth positioning

Bluetooth positioning: Bluetooth positioning is based on RSSI (received signal strength indication) positioning principle. Bluetooth indoor technology uses several Bluetooth LAN access points installed indoors to maintain the network. As a basic network connection method based on multiple users, it ensures that Bluetooth LAN access points are always the main equipment of this piconet, and then obtains the user's location information by measuring the signal strength.

According to different positioning terminals, Bluetooth positioning methods can be divided into active positioning, passive positioning and active-passive integrated positioning.

The network-side positioning system consists of a terminal (such as a mobile phone with low-power Bluetooth), a Bluetooth beacon node, a Bluetooth gateway, a wireless local area network and a back-end data server. Terminal-side positioning system consists of terminal equipment (such as mobile phone embedded with SDK software package) and beacon. The advantage of Bluetooth positioning is that it is simple to realize. Terminal-side positioning is generally used for user terminals such as indoor positioning navigation and precise location marketing. Network side positioning is mainly used for personnel tracking positioning, asset positioning and passenger flow analysis.

Second, ultra-wideband indoor positioning

Ultra-wideband (UWB) technology is a new wireless communication technology which is completely different from traditional communication technology in recent years. UWB technology is a wireless technology based on extremely narrow pulse, no carrier, high transmission rate, low transmission power and strong penetration ability.

UWB positioning technology can meet the needs of different positioning services in different application environments (3D/2D/ 1D/ regional positioning), accurately locate people, vehicles and assets, and realize extended functions such as trajectory tracking, regional alarm and camera linkage on the basis of positioning.