Mobile Anchor-based Localization over Android

Abstract

While localization is essential to many applications, there are quantities of wireless nodes whose accurate locations remain unknown or hard to tell. As a remedy, this paper is leveraging a GPS-capable Android handset that features portability and computing capability to collect data and display localization results thereof. Our objective is to locate the unknown nodes in consideration of radio-signal irregularity. To this end, we devise a hybrid means to incorporate received signal strengths used in range-based schemes with the notion of estimative regions adopted in range-free methods to refine the area of interest for localization. Our scheme operates without involved computations such as to accommodate many usable reference coordinates. Our treatment mitigates the errors of estimation resulting from different radio signal propagation scenarios, by taking an additional parameter to narrow region size for ameliorating localization accuracy. Experiments are conducted to demonstrate our performance results overlying Google Maps on the handset and through quantitative comparisons with trilateration under different settings. Performance results show the effectiveness of our development.