A Practical Evaluation of Radio Signal Strength for Ranging-based Localization (2007)

Published in

• Newsletter
  ACM SIGMOBILE Mobile Computing and Communications

Online copies

Article

Synopsis

Use RSS and multilateration to locate nodes in multi-hop sensor network under some conditions. Quantify the effects of various environmental factors.

Localization

Each node use linear RSS-to-distance model to estimate distances to other nodes, find shortest path to each anchor whose position is given. Shortest path distances are then used for multilateration.

Shortest path

• distance: DV-distance algorithm
• APS

Quantities

Quantify the effects of environmental factors on RSS.

• noise: Standard deviation of all RSS values that may be observed at a particular distance in a given environment.
• attenuation rate: Rate of decrease of RSS respect to distance.
• effective range: Integral over the probability of making a RSS measurement at a particular distance \(p(\mathit{measurement} | d)\) weighted by the probability of finding a neighbor at that distance \(\Pi * d^2\).

Note: Article does not explain what \(\Pi\) is. It is probably assuming nodes’ projection onto 2D plane follows uniform distribution so that the probability of finding a neighbor is proportional to the area of circle with radius \(d\), i.e. proportional to \(\pi d^2\).

Environmental factors

• Time
• Elevation
• Vegetation
• Transmission power
• Packaging
• Indoor environment