DIGITAL TV-BASED POSITIONING FOR FIRST RESPONDER TRACKING IN GPS-DENIED ENVIRONMENTS

An area significantly lacking in first responder situational awareness is accurate responder location within various types of building structures above ground and underground such as tunnels and basements where GPS coverage is unavailable. GPS alternatives that rely on pre-deployed infrastructure such as indoor WiFi or mobile wireless networks or require the deployment of uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) are not robust or universally applicable and are yet to be adopted on a wide scale. In our Phase I effort, Tiami LLC proposed the use of public digital TV (DTV) stations as positioning beacons for three-dimensional indoor tracking in GPS-denied environments. DTV stations provide near-ubiquitous coverage across the United States since a single high-power DTV station has a range of 35-40 miles. Our modeling and simulation indicate that receiver three-dimensional position can be inferred to within ±10 m accuracy when at least four DTV stations are receivable. Now that the technical feasibility has been established, in Phase II we will prototype a portable DTV positioning receiver and demonstrate the usage of over-the-air DTV ATSC 3.0 broadcast transmissions from multiple stations to infer the receiver position in an outdoor test.