Ramya Srinivasan (Intel)

Oct 10, 2016.

Title and Abstract

Beyond GPS: high accuracy technologies for your smartphone
Global navigation systems (GPS/GNSS) have played an important role in the proliferation of location and context aware applications. Today, almost every smartphone sold has a built-in GNSS chipset. Unfortunately, GNSS has its shortcomings - a) it is not accurate in urban canyons and in indoor environments, b) GNSS receivers are power intensive and c) they have high time to first fix (TTTF), going up to 2 minutes with a cold start. Clearly GNSS is not a complete solution to the location needs of the modern world and alternate location solutions are needed where GNSS is deficient.

This presentation will provide an overview of alternate location technologies, with specific focus on Wi-Fi based indoor positioning and a high accuracy LTE based solution for E911 for locating smartphones.

Wi-Fi based indoor location can provide an accuracy up to one meter. This unleashes a huge set of use-cases. For example, in the case of first responders, locating fire-fightersvictims in a large high rise burning building requires high precision localization. Other use-cases include providing routing assistance to visually disabled, providing advertisementscoupons in a mall or stadium in a context-aware manner etc.

E-911 is mandated in the United States and is regulated by the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) which specifies the accuracy with which a 911 caller should be located. In challenging deep indoor environments and urban canyons, GNSS does not meet these accuracy requirements. The LTE based positioning - Observed time difference of arrival (OTDOA) - has been developed as an effective fallback to GNSS in these scenarios.

Bio

Dr. Srinivasan obtained her PhD in Electrical & Computer Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology in December, 2011. Her research was focused on optimizing data rates in MIMO (multi-input, multi-output) wireless networks. MIMO is one of the fundamental technologies responsible for the high data rates possible in current Wi-Fi technology, LTE and next generation communication systems.

Between 2012 to 2016,Dr. Srinivasan was a systems engineer for Qualcomm Inc, Santa Clara, where she worked on various position location technologies, including on Wi-Fi based indoor navigation and LTE-based positioning for E-911.

She is currently a modem simulation engineer at Intel, Santa Clara where she is involved in designing the 5G baseband modem for mobile chipsets.