Device-Free Localization Using Enhanced Channel Selection and a Distance-Based Elliptical Model

Abstract

Device-free localization (DFL) based on wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is a technology that can detect and locate a person by measuring the changes in received signals without the need for any wireless devices. As an emerging important technology in WSNs, radio tomographic imaging (RTI) has received increasing attention. However, there is much room to improve localization accuracy in RTI. To address this issue, an enhanced channel-selection method and a new distance-based elliptical model are proposed to improve the localization accuracy. The enhanced frequency channel-selection method selects two channels with the lowest received signal strength (RSS) variances to collect data. This approach is more robust to environmental change. The new distance-based elliptical model is based on the distance between the voxels and sensors. Meanwhile, the communication links are divided into line-of-sight (LOS) paths and nonline-of-sight (NLOS) paths. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm improves the accuracy of positioning by up to 44.8% over some state-of-the-art RTI methods with low cost.

Keywords

• Device-free localization
• wireless sensor networks
• received signal strength
• radio tomographic imaging
• elliptical model