GPS-free directional localization via dual wireless radios

Abstract

Location discovery, especially in mobile environments, has recently become the key component of many applications. Accurate location discovery, particularly in safety critical applications using autonomous robots or unmanned vehicles, however, is still an open problem. Existing popular methods either heavily rely on the use of global positioning systems (GPS) which do not readily lend themselves for use for the majority of applications where precision is of primary concern or are not suitable for ad-hoc deployments. In this paper, we propose a novel directional localization algorithm, called dual wireless radio localization (DWRL), which performs accurate node localizations in the plane using only distances between nodes, without the use of a GPS or nodes with known positions (anchors). The main novelty of DWRL is the use of an additional radio per node to support directional localization in static networks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time dual radios are employed in a localization setting. Existence of the dual radios on board enables DWRL algorithm to perform directional localization, which is not possible with existing single radio systems in static networks. We present the practical and theoretical benefits of the use of an additional radio per node in detail, test our algorithm under excessive synthetic and real-world noise scenarios, and show that DWRL algorithm is robust enough to perform directional localization even in high noise environments. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.