Influence of supply voltage of node on RSSI-based localization performance and calibration technique

Abstract

Location accuracy is one of the key indicators in measuring the performance of wireless sensor localization systems. Apparently, the localization performance is largely determined by ranging precision in the distance-based localization system. In the RSSI-based distance estimation techniques, the accuracy of their estimation is vulnerable to the change of RSSI measured values. As is known, the Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) is environment dependent in certain extent. In addition, the received signal strength mainly depends on the emitting power of the sender. In this paper, the RSSI measured values are investigated when the sending power gets changed due to low supply voltage of the sender, and then a calibrated method is proposed. Experiments show that the proposed method can significantly mitigate distance estimation errors caused by low supply voltage, thus it can be widely used in battery powered wireless sensor localization systems. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.