Location tracking in mobile networks under correlated shadowing effects

Abstract

Mobile location tracking based on the received signal strength (RSS) is known to be easily influenced by the shadowing effects in wireless propagation channels. In this paper, we exploit the correlation among shadowing losses at adjacent locations to improve the performance of location tracking. A location tracking algorithm consisting of a maximum likelihood estimator and a Kalman filter is proposed to jointly track the mobile location and the shadowing losses via the RSS. Under a shadowed propagation environment, the simulation shows that, without knowing the underlying mobility model but only the target's speed information, the shadowing tracking furnishes worthful information for the location tracking algorithm, and the proposed method thus provides acceptable performance both for the location and shadowing tracking. © 2009 IEEE.