Terminal localization for indoor Wireless Local Area Networks (WLAN) is critical for the deployment of location-aware computing inside of buildings. The purpose of this research work is not to develop a novel WLAN terminal location estimation technique or algorithm, but rather to tackle challenges in survey data collection and in calibration of multiple mobile terminal Received Signal Strength (RSS) data. Three major challenges are addressed in this thesis: first, to decrease the influence of outliers introduced in the distance measurements by Non-Line-of-Sight (NLoS) propagation when a ultrasonic sensor network is used for data collection; second, to obtain high localization accuracy in the presence of fluctuations of the RSS measurements caused by multipath fading; and third, to determine an automated calibration method to reduce large variations in RSS levels when different mobile devices need to be located. In this thesis, a robust window function is developed to mitigate the influence of outliers in survey terminal localization. Furthermore, spatial filtering of the RSS signals to reduce the effect of the distance-varying portion of noise is proposed. Two different survey point geometries are tested with the noise reduction technique: survey points arranged in sets of tight clusters and survey points uniformly distributed over the network area. Finally, an affine transformation is introduced as RSS calibration method between mobile devices to decrease the effect of RSS level variation and an automated calibration procedure based on the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm is developed. The results show that the mean distance error in the survey terminal localization is well within an acceptable range for data collection. In addition, when the spatial averaging noise reduction filter is used the location accuracy improves by 16% and by 18% when the filter is applied to a clustered survey set as opposed to a straight-line survey set. Lastly, the location accuracy is within 2m when an affine function is used for RSS calibration and the automated calibration algorithm converged to the optimal transformation parameters after it was iterated for 11 locations.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uvic.ca/oai:dspace.library.uvic.ca:1828/2939 |
| Date | 11 August 2010 |
| Creators | Felix, Diego |
| Contributors | McGuire, Michael Liam |
| Source Sets | University of Victoria |
| Language | English, English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Rights | Available to the World Wide Web |
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