NG - UWB

Ultra-wideband (UWB) communications enable localization in the Internet of Things (IoT) thanks to new transceivers that are small, cheap, low-power, and yet offer centimeter-level distance estimation (ranging) along with communication. Unfortunately, a few challenges hamper full exploitation of UWB in IoT: power consumption, scalability of ranging targets and update rate, lack of integrated ranging and networking stacks, limited infrastructure. 

In this context, the general objective of NG-UWB was twofold. First, the research focused on innovative techniques and systems that advanced the state of the art of UWB systems, e.g., increasing scalability (number of users, rate, operational area), reducing power consumption and supporting infrastructure-less applications.

The activities considered not only the peculiar aspects of UWB, distance estimation (ranging) and localization, but also communication, an aspect of great potential but so far underestimated.

In parallel, the project demonstrated the added value of the above in real and impactful use cases: the analysis of people’s movement in a museum and the support to systems based on robots and drones, social distancing and work safety alarm systems (proximity warning). This combination of new techniques and their application was crucial to validate the results but also to identify new research lines connected to the initial ones.

The link between the two dimensions was the experimental approach adopted, focused on the development of prototypes, made possible by the CLOVES testbed set up at UNITN (130 nodes on 8000 sqm).