RTK-LoRa: High-Precision, Long-Range and Energy-Efficient Localization for Mobile IoT devices

Abstract

High precision Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) is a crucial geo-localization feature enabling a wide range of applications, from mobile Internet of Things devices to autonomous drones and self-driving vehicles. Real-Time Kinematic (RTK) is a GNSS technology that attracting increased interest due to the centimeter precision achievable when wireless communication is present on the devices. On the other hand, sending continuously wireless data increases the energy consumption and the cost of the solution, especially when communication is carried over the 4G network. Due to those drawbacks, RTK is not much exploited in the localization of battery-operated devices. This work combines RTK with lowpower long-range communication to achieve sub-meter precision in an energy-efficient RTK-based system. The proposed system exploits a state-of-the-art RTK-GNSS module combined with a long-range and low-power radio (LoRa) to achieve geo-localization with minimal wireless radio infrastructure requirements. An energy-efficient algorithm is proposed and implemented in a microcontroller to have a quick start-up and high accuracy. We evaluate three different GNSS modules and compare their performance in terms of power and accuracy. Experimental results, with in-field measurements, show that an average geo-localization precision of tens of centimeters is achievable on a battery-operated wireless endnode connected to a single base station used as a geostationary reference anchor placed at kilometers of distance. The peak precision measured is below 10 cm.

RTK-LoRa: High-Precision, Long-Range, and Energy-Efficient Localization for Mobile IoT Devices

“…This paper extends the work in [12], where preliminary architecture and results have been presented. In this paper, an optimized architecture of the end-node, which achieves highly accurate localization and allows to trade-off between accuracy and energy consumption, is presented in detail.…”

“…The proposed energy-efficient algorithm and its implementation is illustrated and evaluated with in-field measurements. The main contributions of this paper and the improvements with respect to [12] can be summarized as follows:…”