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Case Study – Tracking & Locating

The Challenge

An established Tracking company wanted to enhance their product offering to provide a second direction finding vector & improve performance & reliability. The customer wanted a new air interface for their transceivers that would allow them to be geolocated using timing measurement in addition to direction finding.

Our Approach

The new air interface had to provide a sensitivity similar to their previous system but carry significantly more user data. The customer provided the processing hardware, and the radio front ends; initially, it appeared that the processing requirements would exceed the capability by 2 orders of magnitude. We took the specification supplied by the customer and designed and modelled uplink and downlink physical layers to achieve the desired performance, with a view to the capabilities of the processing hardware. We then implemented this new air interface on the hardware supplied, noting that the processing resources were highly constrained, requiring several architectural iterations to reduce the complexity; the bulk of the processing was performed in an FPGA. The remote transceiver was a new design, and we advised the customer on the processing FPGA to use in this device. A close working relationship was maintained; and all code and documentation was supplied to enable ongoing support of their product with or without us in future.

The Outcome

The new air interface software and firmware was able to perform the timing measurements to the required accuracy at the sensitivity specified, enabling improvements to performance for tracking & locating accuracy. The entire system is being trialled by the End customer and system user where it is performing very well.