Scope and topics of the workshop
Network localization and navigation (NLN) has been gaining relevance for a myriad of new location-based services for indoor and outdoor environments. The Internet of Things (IoT), cyber-physical systems, autonomous vehicles, and 5G communication will all benefit from NLN capabilities. All this potential can be unleashed by designing solutions for localization and navigation by a combination of distributed algorithms and off-the-shelf cost-effective technologies. These technologies are highly heterogeneous and encompass a multitude of sensory modalities such as RF, IMU, sonar, laser, IR, and visible light. In particular, RF signals can include WiFi/802.11x, UWB, RFID, Bluetooth, NFC, 3GPP/LTE, and the so-called signals of opportunity (e.g., TV). The availability of such technologies clearly entails that the latest challenge in NLN is not only to fully exploit individual sensors for these tasks, but also to design and implement methods that jointly fuse information from multimodal sensors as well as from multiple agents. Data fusion, cross-layer optimization, and new application scenarios are therefore the key aspects for further advances of the field and present exciting challenges for wireless communications and signal processing practitioners and researchers.
The goal of the workshop is to solicit the development of new positioning strategies that leverage the wealth of wireless communication technologies as well as of new location-aware procedures to enhance the efficiency of communication networks. This workshop will bring together academic and industrial researchers to identify and discuss technical challenges and recent results related to these issues. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to the following:
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Rationale
The availability of real-time high-accuracy location-awareness is essential for current and future wireless applications. Reliable localization and navigation is a critical component for a diverse set of applications including logistics, security tracking, IoT, search and rescue operations, control of home appliances, autonomous vehicles, drones, and military systems, as well as a large set of emerging wireless sensor network (WSN) applications. Unfortunately, GPS often fails to provide reliable localization and navigation in indoor environments, and in some critical outdoor environments as well. In GPS-challenged environments, wireless communication technologies, e.g., WiFi and UWB, have been exploited with the aid of local terrestrial networks, complementing sensory measurements such as IMU, for localization in the last decade.
As one of the largest conferences on communications, IEEE ICC features the advances of communications and related technologies, and therefore it is an ideal venue for researchers in the field of NLN to meet and exchange their recent research results. The Workshop on Advances in Network Localization and Navigation will attract a number of submissions of good quality, as evidenced by the past six editions of the workshops in ICC. There are a number of active researchers working in this area, who could contribute their most recent good-quality works to the workshop. Each of the past editions received around 30-50 high-quality submissions, and the acceptance rate was usually below 40%. The workshops attracted a large audience, with more than 30 attendees every time, since localization and navigation emerges as a promising area in the broader field of communications and networks. The good attendances were also partially owing to the keynote talks from prestigious researchers in academia and industry, for example, Prof. Vincent Poor from Princeton University and Prof. Jose M. F. Moura from Carnegie Mellon University.
It is the 7th time that IEEE ICC ANLN workshop is proposed, in view of its success in the past six years. The workshop has a good track record; it is unique, from other workshops in ICC, in its focus on a transversal area with myriad of applications such as wireless localization and navigation. Compared to other conferences dedicated to the same topic, the frame of a broader conference such as ICC gives to the ANLN workshop the opportunity to bring experts from other fields closer to this growing area. This workshop will bring together academic and industrial researchers to identify and discuss technical challenges and recent results in the area of wireless localization and navigation.
Organizers Biographies
Santiago Mazuelas received his Ph.D. in mathematics and in telecommunications engineering from the University of Valladolid, Spain, in 2009 and 2011, respectively. He is currently Ramon y Cajal Researcher at the Basque Center
for Applied Mathematics (BCAM). Prior to joining BCAM, he was a Staff Engineer at Qualcomm R&D from 2014 to 2017. He previously worked from 2009 to 2014 as Postdoctoral Fellow and Associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His research interest focus on statistical signal processing, machine learning, and data science. Dr. Mazuelas is an Editor of the IEEE Communications letters, and served as TPC Co-chair at the IEEE Globecom (2014) and IEEE ICC (2015). He received the Best Doctorate Thesis Award from University of Valladolid, the Young Scientist Prize from the Union Radio-Scientifique Internationale (URSI) Symposium, and the Early Achievement Award from the IEEE ComSoc in 2018. His papers received the IEEE ComSoc Fred W. Ellersick Prize, and three Best Paper Awards from the IEEE conferences.
Andrea Giorgetti received the Dr. Ing. degree in electronic engineering and the Ph.D. degree in electronic engineering and computer science from the University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy, in 1999 and 2003, respectively. From 2003 to 2005, he was a Researcher at the National Research Council, Italy. He joined the Department of Electrical, Electronic, and Information Engineering Guglielmo Marconi, University of Bologna, as an Assistant Professor in 2006 and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2014. His research interests include ultrawide bandwidth communication systems, active and passive localization, wireless sensor networks, and cognitive radio. He was the Technical Program Co-Chair of several symposia at the IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC), and the IEEE Global Communications Conference (Globecom). He has been an editor for IEEE Communications Letters and the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications. He has been elected Chair of the IEEE Communications Society's Radio Communications Technical Committee.
Stefania Bartoletti received the Laurea degree in electronics and telecommunications engineering and the Ph.D. degree in Information Engineering from the University of Ferrara, Italy, in 2011 and 2015, respectively. She is a Marie-Sklodowska Curie Global Fellow within the Horizon 2020 European Framework at MIT and the University of Ferrara. From September 2013 to August 2014, she was a Visiting Ph.D. Student at MIT. Her research interests include theory and experimentation of wireless navigation and localization networks, passive and semi-passive tracking via sensor radars and RFID systems. She was a recipient of the Marconi Society Young Scholar Award and the Award for Best Ph.D. Theses in the field of ICT of the Italian Telecommunications and Information Theory Group. Dr. Bartoletti served as TPC Co-Chair for the IEEE ICC Workshop on ANLN (2017), and as TPC member for IEEE International Conferences.
Florian Meyer received the Dipl.-Ing. (M.Sc.) and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from TU Wien, Vienna, Austria in 2011 and 2015, respectively. He was a visiting researcher with the Department of Signals and Systems, Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden in 2013 and with the NATO Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation (CMRE), La Spezia, Italy in 2014 and 2015. In 2016, he joined CMRE as a research scientist. Currently, Dr. Meyer is a Postdoctoral Associate at the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He served as a TPC member of several IEEE conferences and is a co-chair of the IEEE ANLN Workshop at IEEE ICC 2018, Kansas City, MO, USA. His research interests include signal processing for wireless sensor networks, localization and tracking, information-seeking control, message passing algorithms, and finite set statistics. He is an Erwin Schrödinger Fellow.
