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Fiber-optic sensors keep tracking alive when GPS fails
A Queen Mary-led system combines GPS with fiber-optic vibration sensing to track people during outages and in difficult indoor or urban locations.
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GPS can become unreliable or disappear entirely in cities, indoors and underground. A study presented at the IEEE International Conference on Communications in Glasgow describes a hybrid system designed to keep tracking people in those conditions.
Researchers from Queen Mary University of London and partner institutions combined conventional satellite positioning with Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS). DAS turns existing fiber-optic cables buried beneath roads and sidewalks into sensitive vibration sensors. The cables detect tiny movements nearby, which can be converted into movement patterns.
In a real-world trial in southern England, volunteers walked along a route while researchers collected GPS readings and vibration signals from a roadside fiber-optic cable. A deep-learning model processed the combined data and continued predicting each person’s location when GPS was blocked, noisy or available only intermittently.
JDG performance and potential uses
The system, named Joint DAS and GNSS (JDG), consistently outperformed GPS-only tracking and other prediction methods. It remained accurate during complete GPS outages and also performed well on lower-powered devices that collect fewer location points, suggesting compatibility with a broad range of smartphones and IoT sensors.
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The research team included collaborators from Xi’an Jiaotong University in Xi’an, China; Pandit Deendayal Energy University in Gandhinagar, Gujarat, India; and Chicago State University in Chicago. They say JDG could improve location services for smart transportation, emergency response and autonomous navigation.
The study is “An Augmented GNSS-DAS Architecture for Continuous and Robust Positioning,” by Kaiwei Wang et al., published in the proceedings of ICC 2026. DOI: 10.1109/icc59461.2026.11587254.
Andrew Zinin — master’s degree in physics, research experience and longtime science news enthusiast.
Frontier Editor
Dan is our resident futurist, covering electric mobility, space exploration, and the smart home. He's interested in atoms just as much as bits. Whether it's a new battery chemistry, a reusable rocket, or a protocol that finally makes IoT devices talk to each other, Dan breaks down the engineering that pushes humanity forward.
via TechXplore
