Pseudolites to support location services in smart cities : review and prospects

Abstract

The location service is an important part of the smart city. A unified location service for outdoor and indoor/overground and underground activity will assist the construction of smart cities. However, with different coordinate systems and data formats, it is difficult to unify various positioning technologies on the same basis. Global navigation satellite system (GNSS)-based positioning is the only way to provide absolute location under the Earth-centered, Earth-fixed coordinate system (ECEF). Increasing indoor and underground human activity places significant demand on location-based services but no GNSS signals are available there. Fortunately, a type of satellite that is indoors, known as pseudolite, can transmit GNSS-like ranging signals. Users can obtain their position by receiving ranging signals and their resection without adding or switching other sensors when they go from outdoors to indoors. To complete the outreach of the GNSS indoors and underground to support the smart city, how to adapt the pseudolite design and unify coordinate frames for linking to the GNSS remain to be determined. In this regard, we provide an overview of the history of the research and application of pseudolites, the research progress from both the system side and the user side, and the plans for pseudolite-based location services in smart cities.