General-purpose deep tracking platform across protocols for the internet of things
Zhenlin An, Qiongzheng Lin, Ping Li, Lei Yang
Abstract
In recent years, considerable effort has been recently exerted to explore the high-precision RF-tracking systems indoors to satisfy various real-world demands. However, such systems are tailored for a particular type of device (e.g., RFID, WSN or Wi-Fi). With the rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT), various new wireless protocols (e.g., LoRa, Sigfox, and NB-IoT) have been proposed to accommodate different demands. The coexistence of multiple types of IoT devices forces users to deploy multiple tracking systems in a warehouse or a smart home where various IoT devices are running, which causes huge additional costs in installation and maintenance. To address this issue, this work presents iArk, which is a general-purpose tracking platform for all types of IoT devices working at the ultra high frequency band. Our innovation lies in the design of the "K+1"-model hardware, the protocol free middleware, and the multipath resistant learnware. By the virtue of decoupling from wireless protocols, iArk also allows researchers to concentrate on developing a new tracking algorithm without considering the protocol diversity. To date, the platform can support five mainstream types of IoT devices (i.e., NB-IoT, LoRa, RFID, Sigfox and Zigbee) and is scalable to other types with minimal effort.