Enhanced indoor location tracking through body shadowing compensation

This paper presents a radio frequency (RF)-based location tracking system that improves its performance by eliminating the shadowing caused by the human body of the user being tracked. The presence of such a user will influence the RF signal paths between a body-worn node and the receiving nodes. This influence will vary with the user's location and orientation and, as a result, will deteriorate the performance regarding location tracking. By using multiple mobile nodes, placed on different parts of a human body, we exploit the fact that the combination of multiple measured signal strengths will show less variation caused by the user's body. Another method is to compensate explicitly for the influence of the body by using the user's orientation toward the fixed infrastructure nodes. Both approaches can be independently combined and reduce the influence caused by body shadowing, hereby improving the tracking accuracy. The overall system performance is extensively verified on a building-wide testbed for sensor experiments. The results show a significant improvement in tracking accuracy. The total improvement in mean accuracy is 38.1% when using three mobile nodes instead of one and simultaneously compensating for the user's orientation

Coverage prediction and optimization algorithms for indoor environments

A heuristic algorithm is developed for the prediction of indoor coverage. Measurements on one floor of an office building are performed to investigate propagation characteristics and validations with very limited additional tuning are performed on another floor of the same building and in three other buildings. The prediction method relies on the free-space loss model for every environment, this way intending to reduce the dependency of the model on the environment upon which the model is based, as is the case with many other models. The applicability of the algorithm to a wireless testbed network with fixed WiFi 802.11b/g nodes is discussed based on a site survey. The prediction algorithm can easily be implemented in network planning algorithms, as will be illustrated with a network reduction and a network optimization algorithm. We aim to provide an physically intuitive, yet accurate prediction of the path loss for different building types

Modelling the Effect of Human Body around User on Signal Strength and Accuracy of Indoor Positioning

WLAN indoor positioning system (IPS) has high accurate of position estimation and minimal cost. However, environmental conditions such as the people presence effect (PPE) greatly influence WLAN signal and it will decrease the accuracy. This research modelled the effect of people around user on signal strength and the accuracy. We have modelled the human body around user effects by proposed a general equation of decrease in RSSI as function of position, distance, and number of people. RSSI decreased from 5 dBm to 1 dBm when people in LOS position, and start from 0.5 dBm to 0.3 dBm when people in NLOS position. The system accuracy decreases due to the presence of people. When the system in NLOS case (ΔRSSI = 0.5 dBm), the presence of people causes a decrease in accuracy from 33% to 57%. Then the accuracy decrease from 273% to 334% in LOS case (ΔRSSI = 5 dBm)

RFID Localisation For Internet Of Things Smart Homes: A Survey

The Internet of Things (IoT) enables numerous business opportunities in fields as diverse as e-health, smart cities, smart homes, among many others. The IoT incorporates multiple long-range, short-range, and personal area wireless networks and technologies into the designs of IoT applications. Localisation in indoor positioning systems plays an important role in the IoT. Location Based IoT applications range from tracking objects and people in real-time, assets management, agriculture, assisted monitoring technologies for healthcare, and smart homes, to name a few. Radio Frequency based systems for indoor positioning such as Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is a key enabler technology for the IoT due to its costeffective, high readability rates, automatic identification and, importantly, its energy efficiency characteristic. This paper reviews the state-of-the-art RFID technologies in IoT Smart Homes applications. It presents several comparable studies of RFID based projects in smart homes and discusses the applications, techniques, algorithms, and challenges of adopting RFID technologies in IoT smart home systems.Comment: 18 pages, 2 figures, 3 table

An efficient iris image thresholding based on binarization threshold in black hole search method

In iris recognition system, the segmentation stage is one of the most important stages where the iris is located and then further segmented into outer and lower boundary of iris region. Several algorithms have been proposed in order to segment the outer and lower boundary of the iris region. The aim of this research is to identify the suitable threshold value in order to locate the outer and lower boundaries using Black Hole Search Method. We chose these methods because of the ineffient features of the other methods in image indetification and verifications. The experiment was conducted using three data set; UBIRIS, CASIA and MMU because of their superiority over others. Given that different iris databases have different file formats and quality, the images used for this work are jpeg and bmp. Based on the experimentation, most suitable threshold values for identification of iris aboundaries for different iris databases have been identified. It is therefore compared with the other methods used by other researchers and found out that the values of 0.3, 0.4 and 0.1 for database UBIRIS, CASIA and MMU respectively are more accurate and comprehensive. The study concludes that threshold values vary depending on the database