A ZigBee-based mobile tracking system through wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks have been deployed widely. Sensor networks involve sensor nodes which are very small in size, low in cost and have a short battery-life. One of the critical wireless sensor network applications is localisation and tracking mobile sensor nodes. ZigBee is a new emerging technology for low rate, low power and low range communication networks, which aims to provide long battery life for network devices. In this paper, we discuss various localisation and tracking techniques and categorise these techniques based on the communication between nodes in centralised and decentralised localisation systems. We propose a decentralised ZigBee-based tracking system to detect and track the location of mobile nodes indoors based on the received signal strength (RSS). The proposed tracking system is a range-free system, which does not require additional hardware, depends on a new weight function, and can be deployed wherever the node density is low. The tracking system is implemented by ZigBee sensor devices, and experiments are done to evaluate the proposed tracking system based on accuracy and communication cost. Keywords: localisation; tracking.Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Alhmiedat, T.A. and Yang, S-H. (2008) 'A ZigBee-based mobile tracking system through wireless sensor networks', Int.

A hybrid indoor localization solution using a generic architectural framework for sparse distributed wireless sensor networks

“…The results from [2] showed that the weighted RSSI-values give a more accurate position than the normal RSSI-values. For Several tests have been executed.…”

“…The first one is a range-based solution described by Tareq Ali Alhmiedat et al in [2]. The proposed algorithm is based on weighted RSSI values.…”

“…The proposed algorithm is based on weighted RSSI values. The main idea of RSSI is that the transmission power P T directly affect the received power P R [2], the linear relationship becomes clear:…”

“…The proposed algorithm in [2] not only uses the RSSI-values to measure the distance between a fixed and mobile node, but also the distance between the fixed nodes mutually is measured. These values function as weight factors for the distance calculation between the fixed and mobile node.…”

Wireless Sensor Network Based Mobile Tracking System

“…Typically, an RSS-based mobile tracking approach usually consists of a set of static nodes with known location information, referred to as reference nodes. The tracking algorithm tries to continuously estimate the mobile target's location from the RSS measurements between the mobile target and its neighboring reference nodes [3], [4]. Since existence of multipath fading, reflections, diffraction and interference highly affects the correspondence between the RSS and relative distance, more works [5], [6] are proposed to minimize the dynamic fluctuation of the radio signal received from each reference node.…”