RSS Distribution-Based Passive Localization and Its Application in Sensor Networks

Passive localization is fundamental for many applications such as activity monitoring and real-time tracking. Existing received signal strength (RSS)-based passive localization approaches have been proposed in the literature, which depend on dense deployment of wireless communication nodes to achieve high accuracy. Thus, they are not cost-effective and scalable. This paper proposes the RSS distribution-based localization (RDL) technique, which can achieve high localization accuracy without dense deployment. In essence, RDL leverages the RSS and the diffraction theory to enable RSS-based passive localization in sensor networks. Specifically, we analyze the fine-grained RSS distribution properties at a variety of node distances and reveal that the structure of the triangle is efficient for low-cost passive localization. We further construct a unit localization model aiming at high accuracy localization. Experimental results show that RDL can improve the localization accuracy by up to 50%, compared to existing approaches when the error tolerance is less than 1.5 m. In addition, we apply RDL to facilitate the application of moving trajectory identification. Our moving trajectory identification includes two phases: an offline phase where the possible locations can be estimated by RDL and an online phase where we precisely identify the moving trajectory. We conducted extensive experiments to show its effectiveness for this application—the estimated trajectory is close to the ground truth.