Wireless Positioning in IoT: A Look at Current and Future Trends

Connectivity solutions for the Internet of Things (IoT) aim to support the needs imposed by several applications or use cases across multiple sectors, such as logistics, agriculture, asset management, or smart lighting. Each of these applications has its own challenges to solve, such as dealing with large or massive networks, low and ultra-low latency requirements, long battery life requirements (i.e., more than ten years operation on battery), continuously monitoring of the location of certain nodes, security, and authentication. Hence, a part of picking a connectivity solution for a certain application depends on how well its features solve the specific needs of the end application. One key feature that we see as a need for future IoT networks is the ability to provide location-based information for large-scale IoT applications. The goal of this paper is to highlight the importance of positioning features for IoT applications and to provide means of comparing and evaluating different connectivity protocols in terms of their positioning capabilities. Our compact and unified analysis ends with several case studies, both simulation-based and measurement-based, which show that high positioning accuracy on low-cost low-power devices is feasible if one designs the system properly.