Device-free electromagnetic passive localization using link line information in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

The electromagnetic passive localization without the need of carrying any device, named device-free passive localization (DFPL) technique, is an emerging technology for determining an uncooperative target's position. The DFPL technique detects the shadowed links in a monitored area and realizes localization with the received signal strength (RSS) measurements of these links. However, most current RSS-based DFPL schemes belong to the model-based DFPL method, since the localization accuracy depends on the shadowing model. Moreover, model-based DFPL methods require high memory and computing resources for accurate tracking performance, and thus may not be suitable for resource-constrained applications. To overcome these problems, in this paper we propose a lightweight DFPL method which makes use of recent link lines detected by wireless sensor networks to estimate the target's location. This method can be independent of the shadowing model and can also reduce the algorithm's storage and computational resource requirements. The effectiveness and robustness of the proposed scheme are demonstrated by experimental results where the proposed algorithm yields substantial improvement for localization performance and complexity.