Location, Localization, and Localizability

Abstract

Location-aware technology spawns numerous unforeseen pervasive applications in a wide range of living, production, commence, and public services. This article provides an overview of the location, localization, and localizability issues of wireless ad-hoc and sensor networks. Making data geographically meaningful, location information is essential for many applications, and it deeply aids a number of network functions, such as network routing, topology control, coverage, boundary detection, clustering, etc. We investigate a large body of existing localization approaches with focuses on error control and network localizability, the two rising aspects that attract significant research interests in recent years. Error control aims to alleviate the negative impact of noisy ranging measurement and the error accumulation effect during cooperative localization process. Network localizability provides theoretical analysis on the performance of localization approaches, providing guidance on network configuration and adjustment. We emphasize the basic principles of localization to understand the state-of-the-art and to address directions of future research in the new and largely open areas of location-aware technologies.Keywords location-based services (LBS), localization, error control, localizability, wireless ad-hoc and sensor networks LocationThe proliferation of wireless and mobile devices has fostered the demand for context-aware applications, in which location is viewed as one of the most significant contexts. For example, pervasive medical care is designed to accurately record and manage patient movements [1][2] ; smart space enables the interaction between physical space and human activities [3][4] ; modern logistics has major concerns on goods transportation, inventory, and warehousing [5][6] ; environmental monitoring networks sense air, water, and soil quality and detect the source of pollutants in real time [7][8][9][10][11] ; and mobile peer-to-peer computing encourages content sharing and contributing among mobile hosts in the vicinity [12][13] . In brief, location-based service (LBS) is a key enabling technology of these applications and widely exists in nowadays wireless communication networks from the short-range Bluetooth to the long-range telecommunication networks, as illustrated in Fig.1.Recent technological advances have enabled the development of low-cost, low-power, and multifunctional sensor devices. These nodes are autonomous devices with integrated sensing, processing, and communication capabilities. With the rapid development of wireless sensor networks (WSNs), location information becomes critically essential and indispensable. The overwhelming reason is that WSNs are fundamentally intended to provide information on spatial-temporal characteristics of the physical world; hence, it is important to associate sensed data with locations, making data geographically meaningful. For example, a number of applications, such as object tracking and environment monitoring, inherently rely on loc...

A novel hybrid localization system combining hexagon-based algorithm with mobile anchor

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RSSI-based Algorithm for Indoor Localization

“…Wireless localization algorithms can be roughly divided into two categories [2], Range-based and Range-free localization algorithms. Range-based localization algorithms mainly include RSSI-based trilateral localization algorithm, arrival angle algorithm (AOA), arrival time algorithm (TOA) and time difference of arrival (TDOA) algorithm.…”

A incremental localization based on feasible weighted least squares

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