Kalman-based mobility tracking with range-free localization under a realistic device distribution

The performance of range-free localization is vulnerable to change of connectivity information. To solve the problem, we propose a Kalman-based mobility tracking algorithm combined with range-free localization under a realistic device distribution. We considered a large indoor environment of a real shopping mall for the performance evaluation. To simulate the real propagation scenario, the radio irregularity was applied on the map of the shopping mall according to the location of devices. We demonstrate that the Kalman-based mobility tracking with range-free measurements outperforms the range-free only localization algorithm. Various factors such as the device distribution density, radio irregularity, and communication range influencing the tracking performance was analyzed.