Signals of opportunity assisted ubiquitous geolocation and navigation technology

The desire of geolocation and navigation technologies that provide precise, fast and reliable geo-services has exploded in the recent years, and there is a dramatic increase in the geo-service market varies from mass market applications to the new and innovative applications. The lack of reliable GNSS signals in the NLOS environment confronts many innovative ideas related to mass market location-based applications. But there is an optimized way to provide the ubiquitous geolocation services via exploitation of signals of opportunity (SoOP). The core concept of ubiquitous geolocation and navigation is provide globally available geo-services by giving the mobile terminal the ability to acquire their location information, this technology can be applied at all scales geo-reference by sharing some simple, inexpensive, robust geolocation and navigation algorisms for different technology such as GNSS and other emerging technology, and the goals of the ubiquitous geolocation and navigation service are reliable availability, transparency, seamlessness, awareness, and trustworthiness. SoOP are primarily envisioned to be man-made radio emitters not originally intended for geolocation and navigation, but may be extended to active beacons purposely deployed in an emergency situation, in this paper, we also regarded the signals of different wireless network those defined by the IEEE 802.11, IEEE 802.15 and IEEE 802.16 as an important part of SoOP. The use of widely available, powerful, and economically important SoOP in Hong Kong will provide a robust geolocation and navigation capability. We made some initial investigation into the use of the SoOP through feasibility studies and prototype investigations of the use of wireless local area network (WLAN), ultra-wide band (UWB) and ZigBee.