Empirical evaluation of the limits on localization using signal strength

  • Authors:

  • Gayathri Chandrasekaran;Mesut Ali Ergin;Jie Yang;Song Liu;Yingying Chen;Marco Gruteser;Richard P. Martin

  • Affiliations:

  • WINLAB, Rutgers University, North Brunswick, NJ;WINLAB, Rutgers University, North Brunswick, NJ;Dept. of ECE, Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, NJ;WINLAB, Rutgers University, North Brunswick, NJ;Dept. of ECE, Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, NJ;WINLAB, Rutgers University, North Brunswick, NJ;WINLAB, Rutgers University, North Brunswick, NJ

  • Venue:
  • SECON'09 Proceedings of the 6th Annual IEEE communications society conference on Sensor, Mesh and Ad Hoc Communications and Networks
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

This work investigates the lower bounds of wireless localization accuracy using signal strength on commodity hardware. Our work relies on trace-driven analysis using an extensive indoor experimental infrastructure. First, we report the best experimental accuracy, twice the best prior reported accuracy for any localization system. We experimentally show that adding more and more resources (e.g., training points or landmarks) beyond a certain limit, can degrade the localization performance for lateration-based algorithms, and that it could only be improved further by "cleaning" the data. However, matching algorithms are more robust to poor quality RSS measurements. We next compare with a theoretical lower bound using standard Cramér Rao Bound (CRB) analysis for unbiased estimators, which is frequently used to provide bounds on localization precision. Because many localization algorithms are based on different mathematical foundations, we apply a diverse set of existing algorithms to our packet traces and found that the variance of the localization errors from these algorithms are smaller than the variance bound established by the CRB. Finally, we found that there exists a wide discrepancy from what freespace models predict in the signal to distance function even in an environment with limited shadowing and multipath, thereby imposing a fundamental limit on the achievable localization accuracy indoors.