Research on Smart Space Oriented Location Awareness Method

Smart space is a result of pervasive computing embodying the integration of computer, communication and digital media technology, which makes it possible to integrate the physical world and the virtual world in the information space together as a whole. Location awareness is a key technology of smart space, and is the basic service needed by other applications. Multidimensional scaling (MDS) is a technique in mathematical psychology, which can the distance or dissimilarity measures between points and produce a representation of the data in a small number of dimensions. In the paper, MDS is used to derive node locations that fit those estimated distances, and a smart space oriented location awareness method (SSOLA) is proposed, which can position all the nodes of the networks accurately only by means of the connectivity information—who is within communications range of whom. Provided with known positions for several anchor nodes, the absolute positions for all nodes can be got by SSOLA. Simulation studies demonstrate that SSOLA is more robust to measurement error, and has less positioning error, less time cost and better scalability than previous proposals in the same conditions. Furthermore, it can achieve comparable results using much fewer anchor nodes than previous methods, and even yields relative coordinates when no anchor nodes are available. SSOLA can be used in large and heavy traffic wireless environment, such as