Indoor Positioning – an Ad-hoc Positioning System

The aim of this paper is to discuss the development of an automatic, low-cost system that exploits current or near future wireless communications technology to enable continuous tracking of the location of devices in all environments. The development of such a wireless sensor network involves system design, digital signal processing, protocol development, extraction of ranges and localisation. This paper focuses on the user requirements, system architecture and network positioning. The user requirements are presented with a focus on applications in geodesy. A high level strategy for the positioning function is presented based on an ad-hoc geodetic network positioning method including issues of accuracy, quality and reliability of the node positions. Results show that it is possible to achieve a position deviation that is of the size of the ranging error.