Contributions to Cooperative Localization Techniques within Mobile Wireless Body Area Networks

Resumé Dans le cadre de cette thèse, on se proposait de développer de nouveaux mécan-ismes de radiolocalisation, permettant de positionner les noeuds de réseaux cor-porels sans-l (WBAN) mobiles, en exploitant de manière opportuniste des liens radio coopératifs bas débit à l'échelle d'un même corps (i.e. coopération intra-WBAN), entre rèseaux distincts (i.e. coopération inter-WBAN), et/ou vis-à-vis de l'infrastructure environnante. Ces nouvelles fonctions coopératives présentent un intérêt pour des applications telles que la navigation de groupe ou la capture de mouvement à large échelle. Ce sujet d'étude, par essence multidisciplinaire, a per-mis d'aborder des questions de recherche variées, humine-biomécanique et de ayant trait à la modélisation physique réalisés tenaient compte, autant que possible, des contraintes liées aux standards de communication WBAN émergeants (e.g. Impulse Radio-Ultra Wideband (IR-UWB) IEEE 802.15.6), par exemple en termes de bande fréquentielle ou de taux d'erreur. Abstract Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN), which have been subject to growing research interests for the last past years, start covering unprecedented needs in application elds such as healthcare, security, sports or entertainment. Even more recently, such networks have been considered for new opportunistic and stand-alone radiolo-cation functionalities. Under mesh or quasi-mesh topologies, mobile on-body nodes can indeed be located within a cooperative fashion, considering peer-to-peer range measurements based on e.g., Impulse Radio-Ultra Wideband (IR-UWB) Time of Arrival (TOA) estimates or Narrow-Band (N-B) Received Signal Strength Indicators (RSSI) at 2.4GHz. This radiolocation add-on is viewed as an important enabling feature for coarse but opportunistic and large-scale human Motion Capture (MoCap) (e.g. as an alternative to costly and geographically restricted acquisition systems) and/or for robust group navigation applications in practical environments (i.e. under severe non-line of sight conditions). In this context, the PhD investigations accounted herein aim at exploring new ii WBAN cooperative localization mechanisms, which could benet jointly from on-body links at the body scale (i.e. intra-WBAN cooperation), body-to-body links between distinct mobile users (i.e. inter-WBAN cooperation), or o-body links with respect to the infrastructure. Following a multidisciplinary approach, we have thus addressed theoretical questions related to physical modeling (e.g. space-time correlation of radiolocation metrics, human mobility...) or to algorithmic and cross-layer design (e.g. cooperative localization and tracking algorithms under realistic protocol constraints, links selection and scheduling...). A few more practical aspects have also been dealt with (e.g. post-processing of past measurement campaigns, development of adapted cross-layer simulation tools and eld experiments). More specically, based on WBAN channel measurements, single-link ranging error …