The Faculty of Applied Engineering has a new doctor! Dr. Noori Bni Lam defended his doctoral thesis on the 11th of May, with professor Maarten Weyn and professor Jan Steckel as promotors. The doctoral thesis is titled 'Angle of Arrival Estimation for Low Power and Long Range Communication Networks’. 

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a concept that has been evolving in the last decade to provide an internet connectivity to objects of everyday life. The versatility of these objects knows no limits. Whether they’re traditional devices such as bicycles, motors, home appliances, tools of any kind, or modern devices such as sensors (e.g. temperature, humidity, air quality, motions, health monitoring, etc), IoT devices are expected to be deployed massively in the near future. Besides this large amount of IoT devices, most of these devices are also mobile and thus require a means of tracking their location. 

Navigation solutions such as GPS can be used for the localization purposes. However, GPS modules are considered power-hungry receivers, which makes them inappropriate for low power operations. Furthermore, the GPS system is designed to be used in open sky conditions, and so it is severely limited in strong attenuation environments, with little or no service in dense urban canyons or indoor environments. 

Consequently, the localization aspect of the IoT devices is still under enormous developments. These developments vary in terms of complexity, accuracy, and cost effectiveness. In this thesis, Dr. Noori Bni Lam proposes low cost and low power localization systems for IoT devices while maintaining a high accuracy.