Mobile phone based acoustic localization using Doppler shift for wireless sensor networks

Numerous applications of Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) requires a location map of sensor nodes for smart interaction, to ease the manual servicing of nodes etc. To create a location map, the primary task involves finding the locations of sensor nodes with an assumed reference origin (localization). This study proposes a mobile phone (commercial off-the-shelf mobile hardware) based acoustic localization technique that can be used along with physical or logical topology map to ease the search of a specific sensor node. The proposed method makes use of Doppler effect in guiding deployer towards the node of interest. A real-time deployment of the proposed acoustic localization algorithm is performed in an area of 20 m × 20 m using in-house developed IITH Motes and mobile phone. From the experimental analysis it is observed that a reduction of 62.5% and 66.6% in searching time by the user is achieved upon using the proposed algorithm when compared to labeling methodology with both the logical and physical topology scenarios respectively.