I’m not super sure about the specifics but having taken a 5G class, the professor made it quite clear that due to the latency and bandwidth requirements of 5G, precise tracking is required to allow towers to correctly do beam forming.
When talking about the 5G system, cell towers can request a users estimated velocity which when combined with the towers own location combined with the physical radio (that is communicating with the phone (UE)) you can get a pretty good position estimation.
What is new is that network providers are trying to sell this tower/5G data to other companies.
I could be wrong but from my understanding 5G has always required precise tracking of every device connected.
My knowledge on this is the tower should be able to optimise beams without location information. Channel information can be relayed back to the tower for beam optimisation. The tower needs to know the signal path characteristics but not explicitly the location.
Not disputing that location data is used for beam optimisation just that I dont believe it is required.
Exactly, the channel information is all that’s required but you can quite easily get the location information from that, which makes it easier to add additional features from a system point of view.
If I recall correctly, the tower will report channel information to the higher up controller system which will then decide which next tower should be notified of a phone that’s entering its range.
So while explicit positioning isn’t required when dealing with one tower, the system overall does need to determine a users position and velocity to handle tower to tower transfers.
In other words my opinion is that the difference between a towers channel information and a users position is almost one and the same. It’s a handful of math equations away.
This would not be a problem if you phone did not have IMEI and IMSI, and if the telco only provided an anonymous Internet channel. The problem is that you must have a phone number, often linked to your ID and pay with a bank card, linked to your ID, instead of cryptocurrency. Towers and beamforming are not a problem at all.
Yeah, whether or not precise location info is required, even coarse 24/7 location tracking is a huge privacy issue. Privacy was simply never a part of the core design of our phone system in the first place. That needs to change. Device anonymization would be a great first step.
Information about received power and SNR is relayed over the 5G data link to and from the tower, and beamforming happens that way. As a result, the tower doesn't need to know where you are at all. In fact, with higher frequencies, you often get weird bouncy paths for 5G radio signals so the "beam" that gets formed can be a rather odd shape while being optimal.
So when 5G was being deployed to the city I was working for and I could see permits, it struck me as really peculiar just in terms of economics because the density of towers needed is extremely high compared to the previous generation. As a user, I really can’t tell a difference in quality of service. So it seemed like an extremely large capital investment for no gain, which makes me think that the purpose of 5G is some dual use that is not public knowledge. That the intent was to create a high accuracy tracking system for us seems plausible to me given how much money is funded into other surveillance activity.
Wondering where the machine learning model comes into play? Googling doesn’t seem to bring me to an article and the terrastruct site doesn’t mention it as far as I can see.
Just wondering why you decided to use Embassy and RTIC? Was there any specific reasons? I’m doing an Embassy project on an esp right now so wondering if you have any issues or insights worth mentioning?
From my understanding Embassy and RTIC are two different models of concurrency so I’m not sure of any benefit of using both at the same time.
So, on the STM32 (which is the only place I am using RTIC), I don't use the Embassy executor. I just use the embassy-stm32 hal crate for all my peripherals and embassy-futures for some of the executor-agnostic no_std and non-alloc futures utilities.
A lot of embassy (except quite unsurprisingly, the executor) is executor agnostic. In fact, I think it might be _all_ of embassy that is executor agnostic. There's some information here: https://rtic.rs/dev/book/en/rtic_and_embassy.html
While my code is not public yet, here is an example (written by someone else) of STM32 code using the embassy-stm32 I2C peripheral wrapper with RTIC:
Tangentially related, does anyone know of an open source 3D terrain system?
I’ve been thinking of making a native map and globe program similar to Google earth to embed inside a dashboard (visually similar to kerbal space program).
So far I was thinking about just using ArcGIS (or something else) and taking in free Lidar data and imposing the depth to satellite or OSM tiles then rendering them as OBJs in OpenGL (or maybe a full 3d engine like unity).
This unfortunately wouldn’t be an automatic process as lidar data is taxing to process in real time, especially for a SBC.
I do see that there are some 3D tiles sets out there but I don’t see where I can pull them from nor how it compares to the lidar data.
However, the main goal is a 3D terrain viewer in an offline native program.
If anyone wants to look at the future of 5G (well ORAN) here it is: https://gitlab.eurecom.fr/oai/openairinterface5g
When talking about the 5G system, cell towers can request a users estimated velocity which when combined with the towers own location combined with the physical radio (that is communicating with the phone (UE)) you can get a pretty good position estimation.
What is new is that network providers are trying to sell this tower/5G data to other companies.
I could be wrong but from my understanding 5G has always required precise tracking of every device connected.