John Heidemann / Papers / Self-Configuring Localization Systems: Design and Experimental Evaluation

Self-Configuring Localization Systems: Design and Experimental Evaluation
Nirupama Bulusu, John Heidemann, Deborah Estrin and Tommy Tran
USC/Information Sciences Institute

Citation

Nirupama Bulusu, John Heidemann, Deborah Estrin and Tommy Tran. Self-Configuring Localization Systems: Design and Experimental Evaluation. Technical Report 8. University of California, Los Angeles, Center for Embedded Networked Computing. [PDF] [alt PDF]

Abstract

Embedded networked sensors—those that coordinate amongst themselves to achieve a sensing task—promise to revolutionize the way we live, work and interact with the physical environment. Fundamental to such coordination is localization, or the ability to establish spatial relationships among such devices. In very large, ad hoc deployed sensor networks, a localization system based on beacons (special nodes that are position-aware by virtue of being endowed with more sophisticated ranging hardware) can be used to localize smaller devices consistently even in a completely decentralized and scalable manner. However, in unattended sensor networks, these localization systems must \emph self-configure, i.e., autonomously adapt to the dynamics of their environmental setting and the availability of beacons, instead of relying on extensive pre-configuration or manual reconfiguration. In this paper, we present the motivation, design, implementation and experimental evaluation of a self-configuring localization system based on beacons. We identify density as an important parameter in determining localization quality, and propose HEAP and STROBE, two algorithms to enable system self-configuration based on beacon density. Building on the observation that the quality of localization saturates at a transition beacon density, these algorithms (i) automate placement of new beacons at low densities to significantly improve localization quality or (ii) rotate functionality amongst redundant beacons at high beacon densities to significantly increase overall system lifetime. Our performance results include experimental results from implementation of an RF-proximity based localization system using nodes with sharply limited resources (8-bit microprocessor, 8-K ROM, 512 bytes RAM, limited battery life).

Bibtex Citation

@techreport{Bulusu02c,
  author = {Bulusu, Nirupama and Heidemann, John and Estrin, Deborah and Tran, Tommy},
  title = {Self-Configuring Localization Systems: Design
  		 and Experimental Evaluation},
  institution = {University of California, Los Angeles, Center for Embedded Networked Computing},
  year = {2002},
  sortdate = {2002-09-01},
  project = {ilense, scadds, scowr, nocredit},
  jsubject = {sensornet_localization},
  number = {8},
  month = sep,
  note = {Accepted to appear, ACM TOCS},
  jlocation = {johnh: pafile},
  keywords = {localization},
  otherurl = {http://www.cs.ucla.edu/%7ebulusu/papers/Bulusu02c.html},
  url = {https://ant.isi.edu/%7ejohnh/PAPERS/Bulusu02c.html},
  pdfurl = {https://ant.isi.edu/%7ejohnh/PAPERS/Bulusu02c.pdf},
  copyrightholder = {ACM},
  copyrightterms = {
  	Permission to make digital or
  	hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or
  	classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies
  	are not made or distributed for profit or commercial
  	advantage and that new copies bear this notice and the full
  	citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this
  	work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with
  	credit  is permitted.
   
  	To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to
  	redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission
  	and/or a fee. Request Permissions from
  	Publications Dept, ACM Inc.,
  	Fax +1 (212) 869--0481, or
  	permissions@acm.org.
  },
  myorganization = {USC/Information Sciences Institute}
}

Copyright

Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that new copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request Permissions from Publications Dept, ACM Inc., Fax +1 (212) 869–0481, or permissions@acm.org.
Copyright © by John Heidemann