Description du sujet de thèse

This PhD program aims at answering the following research questions: can a very low power device be geo localized for years without changing (or recharging) the feeding battery, while achieving a minimum desired precision for the estimated position? Would this be attainable through Long Range Wide Area Networks (LoRaWAN) instead of Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS)? What are the real suitability and the application scope of LoRaWAN for geo localization purposes? Such questions are motivated by the need to locate people, animals and objects, equipped with a very low power radio transceiver. Indeed, GNSS-enabled devices continuously idle listen to satellite signals, leading to a complete discharge of batteries in short time.

Recently, the LoRaWAN network infrastructure has been proposed as working solution to leverage very low power transmitter localization at the cost of a coarse-grained positioning resolution. This has been done through trilateration based on Time Difference Of Arrival and by exploiting GNSS timing for synchronization purposes. However, to overcome possible service outages or breakdowns of GNSS, a wise approach is to leverage truly GNSS-free LoRaWAN-based positioning system. The first scientific objective is to ensure the maximum achievable positioning precision. Then, this PhD program aims at maximizing the capacity of such system configuration.

Contexte de travail

The Laboratory for Analysis and Architecture of Systems (LAAS) is research unit owned by CNRS with activities in many domains.

The student will be supervised by researchers belonging to the team "Services and Architectures for Advanced Networks" (SARA) and will interact with the researchers involved in the ANR JCJC LAPSUS project.

The research will take place at LAAS-CNRS in Toulouse under the co-direction of Pascal Berthou (pascal.berthou@laas.fr) and Nicola Accettura (nicola.accettura@laas.fr).

Le poste se situe dans un secteur relevant de la protection du potentiel scientifique et technique (PPST), et nécessite donc, conformément à la réglementation, que votre arrivée soit autorisée par l'autorité compétente du MESR.