Tetsuya Kawakami

Active tag emulation for pedestrian localization applications

Active tags are currently used for various tasks in transport and distribution industries, for factory automation or asset tracking. Pedestrian localization is another application of active tags, for which we develop a technique and a practical system. Following preliminary real-world experiments with a system prototype, we continued to develop our active tag based pedestrian localization technique by an emulation approach that is discussed in this paper. We use emulation during development so as to be able to perform large-scale experiments with the pedestrian localization system easily and in a repeatable manner. The experimental results show the good agreement that exists between the real-world pedestrian scenario and the measurements made with the emulated system.

Emulation framework for the design and development of active RFID tag systems

The design and development of active RFID tag systems requires several iterations, and thorough testing in order to ensure that the prototype systems behave as intended. Facilitating these operations contributes significantly to faster product development and to a quicker time to market. The emulation framework that we present makes it easier to carry out the verification and testing related to the design and development of active RFID tag systems. We illustrate the use of this framework during the design and development of an active RFID tag based pedestrian localization system that is being developed by Panasonic Corporation. In this context emulation was successfully used: (i) to identify active RFID tag firmware issues; (ii) to assess the overall performance of the localization system; (iii) to explore the system parameter space so as to identify the values that provide optimum performance; (iv) to extend the range of tested scenarios beyond what could be done through real-world trials.

Distributed Emulator for a Pedestrian Tracking System Using Active Tags

In this paper we introduce a distributed emulator for a pedestrian tracking system using active tags that is currently being developed by the authors. The emulator works on StarBED which is a network testbed consisting of hundreds of PCs connected to each other by Ethernet. The three major components of the emulator (the processor emulator of the active tag micro-controller, RUNE, and QOMET) are all implemented on StarBED. We present the structure of the emulator, how it functions and the results from the emulation of the pedestrian tracking system. The system met the requirements to create a flexible experimental platform to support the development of the pedestrian tracking system. We confirmed the results obtained by running tests corresponding to a real-world experiment.

Emulation system for active tag applications

In this paper we present an active tag emulation system that is used to carry out live experiments with active tag applications. Its two main components are the wireless communication emulator QOMET, and an active tag processor emulator. Experiments are performed using the experiment-support software RUNE on StarBED, the large-scale network testbed at the Hokuriku Research Center of the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, in Ishikawa, Japan. We illustrate the use of our emulation system with a detailed study of a pedestrian localization application. Emulation is used during the development of the pedestrian localization system so as to perform a wide range of experiments easily and in a repeatable manner.

Distributed emulation for the design of active tag based systems

Several choices have to be made during the design process of active tag based systems. Since the number of properties that must be decided before production and wide-scale deployment is relatively high, the use of real experiments in the design phase may be prohibitive. We propose the use of emulation for performing large-scale experiments with active tag based systems easily and in a repeatable manner. Such experiments can be used to validate the behavior of the system, and to decide the values for various system parameters. We illustrate this approach by experimental results obtained with an emulation framework that we designed and implemented for a pedestrian localization active tag based system.

Active tag based pedestrian localization emulation system

We develop an emulation system for performing experiments related to active tag based pedestrian localization. We use emulation as an integral part of our development approach so as to be able to carry out large-scale experiments with ease, and in a repeatable manner. Our demonstration will show how to perform live emulation experiments on a remote network testbed located in Ishikawa, Japan. The experimental results will be visualized using a graphical interface.