Improving the 2D RSSI Based Localization by Precise Transmission Power Selection

Radio frequency wireless technology is surely one of the most used technologies in indoor localization. Indeed, wireless indoor positioning systems can be easily deployed to track the trajectory of an object or a person respect to other moving elements. Within this scenario, different algorithms are implemented to optimize the localization task. Anyway, the majority of the localization algorithms include the distance measurement between anchor nodes and mobile nodes and RF-signals make viable several ways to perform it. Probably, the methods based on the measure of the Received Signal Strength (RSS) are the most exploited. Unfortunately, RSS depends on the transmission medium and the method suffers of nonlinearities, multiple paths and anomalous absorption, thus affecting the distance measurement performances. To mitigate the external influences, transmission parameters, as for example the transmission frequency and transmission power, can be opportunely tuned. To this purpose, in this work, the influence of the power transmission on the localization algorithm performance is investigated using two classical localization algorithms. Furthermore, a heuristic method to select the power transmission that allows the best localization performance for the specific environment is presented and tested. Copyright © 2015 IFSA Publishing, S. L.