6,782 research outputs found
Distributed and adaptive location identification system for mobile devices
Indoor location identification and navigation need to be as simple, seamless,
and ubiquitous as its outdoor GPS-based counterpart is. It would be of great
convenience to the mobile user to be able to continue navigating seamlessly as
he or she moves from a GPS-clear outdoor environment into an indoor environment
or a GPS-obstructed outdoor environment such as a tunnel or forest. Existing
infrastructure-based indoor localization systems lack such capability, on top
of potentially facing several critical technical challenges such as increased
cost of installation, centralization, lack of reliability, poor localization
accuracy, poor adaptation to the dynamics of the surrounding environment,
latency, system-level and computational complexities, repetitive
labor-intensive parameter tuning, and user privacy. To this end, this paper
presents a novel mechanism with the potential to overcome most (if not all) of
the abovementioned challenges. The proposed mechanism is simple, distributed,
adaptive, collaborative, and cost-effective. Based on the proposed algorithm, a
mobile blind device can potentially utilize, as GPS-like reference nodes,
either in-range location-aware compatible mobile devices or preinstalled
low-cost infrastructure-less location-aware beacon nodes. The proposed approach
is model-based and calibration-free that uses the received signal strength to
periodically and collaboratively measure and update the radio frequency
characteristics of the operating environment to estimate the distances to the
reference nodes. Trilateration is then used by the blind device to identify its
own location, similar to that used in the GPS-based system. Simulation and
empirical testing ascertained that the proposed approach can potentially be the
core of future indoor and GPS-obstructed environments
Sub-Nanosecond Time of Flight on Commercial Wi-Fi Cards
Time-of-flight, i.e., the time incurred by a signal to travel from
transmitter to receiver, is perhaps the most intuitive way to measure distances
using wireless signals. It is used in major positioning systems such as GPS,
RADAR, and SONAR. However, attempts at using time-of-flight for indoor
localization have failed to deliver acceptable accuracy due to fundamental
limitations in measuring time on Wi-Fi and other RF consumer technologies.
While the research community has developed alternatives for RF-based indoor
localization that do not require time-of-flight, those approaches have their
own limitations that hamper their use in practice. In particular, many existing
approaches need receivers with large antenna arrays while commercial Wi-Fi
nodes have two or three antennas. Other systems require fingerprinting the
environment to create signal maps. More fundamentally, none of these methods
support indoor positioning between a pair of Wi-Fi devices
without~third~party~support.
In this paper, we present a set of algorithms that measure the time-of-flight
to sub-nanosecond accuracy on commercial Wi-Fi cards. We implement these
algorithms and demonstrate a system that achieves accurate device-to-device
localization, i.e. enables a pair of Wi-Fi devices to locate each other without
any support from the infrastructure, not even the location of the access
points.Comment: 14 page
A linear regression based cost function for WSN localization
Localization with Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) creates new opportunities for location-based consumer communication applications. There is a great need for cost functions of maximum likelihood localization algorithms that are not only accurate but also lack local minima. In this paper we present Linear Regression based Cost Function for Localization (LiReCoFuL), a new cost function based on regression tools that fulfills these requirements. With empirical test results on a real-life test bed, we show that our cost function outperforms the accuracy of a minimum mean square error cost function. Furthermore we show that LiReCoFuL is as accurate as relative location estimation error cost functions and has very few local extremes
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