The Anyplace 4.0 IoT Localization Architecture

The Internet of Things (IoT) revolution has massively introduced sensor-rich tracking devices to an ever growing landscape of smart spaces (e.g., factories, hospitals, and ships). One problem that remains unsolved over the years is the localization problem for IoT, given that Satellite-based solutions are inaccurate in indoor spaces where human activity takes place 80-90% of the time. In this paper, we introduce a novel opensource architecture for IoT localization, coined Anyplace 4.0 IoT (A4IoT), which exploits signal fingerprinting to organize under the same roof a wide range of different localization technologies (e.g., Wi-Fi, BLE, Cellular, UWB, Computer Vision). We present the technical requirements of A4IoT inspired by the Alstom SA smart factory, operating worldwide in rail transport markets. A4IoT comprises a crowdsourcing architecture where deployers can collect and organize fingerprint signals inside smart spaces in a designated localization service running on the Edge (from Raspberry to Datacenter). The service incorporates timeseries databases for tracking targets and deployers can provide accurate room-level localization accuracy (≈ 2 m) on a variety of platforms (e.g., Android, Linux, Mac, Windows, Robot OS) but also integrate A4IoT through Web 2.0 endpoints to their software ecosystems.© 2020 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. P. Mpeis et al., "The Anyplace 4.0 IoT Localization Architecture," 2020 21st IEEE International Conference on Mobile Data Management (MDM), Versailles, France, 2020, pp. 218-225, doi: 10.1109/MDM48529.2020.00045