• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.11 no.2
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• pp.422-429
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• 2007

Location awareness is one of the key functionalities to build an U-city. Recently, many of works of the location-aware systems are emerging to commercially apply to on-going large-scale apartment complex based on U-city. As dwellers or cars being attached with active tags are moving in the U-city complex, the active tags periodically broadcast their own identifiers and receivers fixed along the street or in building use those information to calculate location of them. There are several issues to be considered for such an environment. The first is that the number of active tags operating in the same region are large as much as tens of thousands, and the second is that the active tags should be alive without change of batteries more than a year, hence low power consumption is very important. In this paper we propose i) a new architecture for location-aware system considering such issues, ii) technical issues to implement it using active tags, and iii) a mathematical analytic model to investigate overall performance and verify it by comparing with actual experimental results. Through the analysis we can show the theoretical boundary of the lowest packet loss rate and the maximum number of tags with acceptable performance for the systems based on active tags. The results can be applied to practical design of location-based systems of U-City projects.