A partnership between US company Rosum and Israeli Mobile TV chip business Siano, could change the face of mobile location services with a breakthrough new technology they are calling Alloy.
It turns out that location specialist Rosum Corp and Siano Mobile Silicon have been working together on a new location capability for the past two years, and that existing Siano mobile TV chips already have the capability built into them.
The Rosum software relies on triangulation and power sampling of two or more digital broadcast TV signals, and brings positioning data of the quality of GPS, for much the same price, with the added bonus that it works from existing UHF signals which can penetrate indoors, whereas GPS, more or less just doesn’t work indoors.
The positioning breakthrough is being announced now in the hope that it can secure a lead in femtocell co-ordination. In order for femtocells to work to the best of their ability, the cellular network they are working in needs to know exactly where they are. This is required for dense femtocell installations in particular, where active interference management is needed to re-use cellular spectrum efficiently. But because femtocells are user installed, and installed indoors, very often there is no way to work out where they are. Siano and Rosum are hoping that they can attract the tier one telecommunications suppliers to put one of the Siano chips containing the new Alloy technology, in every femtocell.
Siano CEO Alon Ironi explained, ‘A database of the locations of TV transmitters can be held in the chip or in a server in the network, then once a triangulation is done it can combined this to get an exact position, about as accurate, sometimes more, than GPS. We have had this code in our existing Siano chips for the past two years, waiting for Rosum to mature its business plans.
‘We have had to build a special platform on the chip to process the algorithm intensive location calculation, because TV signals can be highly multipath with lots of bounces and it is important to have the low level number crunching supported,’ said Ironi.
Other applications for these chips can be to put them in portable devices for tracking assets, and Rosum investor Trueposition may well be a route to market for that application. But Siano says that it can compete head on with GPS. ‘Our chips can be used to watch Mobile TV, and where that is widespread, like in China, when you want a location instead, new software can be dynamically loaded onto the same chip, and you can get your location, so there is no need for a GPS chip on the phone at all if you already have the mobile TV chip.’
Rosum points out that broadcast TV signals are 100,000 time more powerful than GPS signals, and this extends location and synchronization capabilities deep into buildings and urban environments.