EasyLoc: RSS-based localization made easy

Abstract

Localization based on Received Signal Strength (RSS) is a key method for locating objects in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). However, current RSS-based methods are ineffective at both deployment and operation design levels since they (i.) usually require a labor-intensive pre-deployment profiling operations to map the RSS to either locations or distances and (ii.) rely on heavy processing operations. These two designs problems limit the possibility of implementing the localization technique on resources constrained sensor nodes and also restrict its scalability and practical use. In this paper, we tackle the challenge of devising a self-organizing and practical RSS-based localization technique that improves on previous approaches in terms of ease of deployment, ease of implementation while still providing a reasonable accuracy. To this end, we come up with a new solution, EasyLoc, a plug-and-play and distributed RSS-based localization method that requires zero pre-deployment configuration. The idea consists in exploiting the available distance information between anchors to derive an online and anchor-specific RSS-to-distance mapping. We show that, in addition to its simplicity, EasyLoc provides location errors of 90% less than 1m and an average error of 0.48m in small environment and 1.8m in large environment. © 2012 Published by Elsevier Ltd.