Analysis of RSS-based location estimation techniques in fading environments

Distance estimation techniques based on RSS (received signal strength) measurements put low demand on the hardware and software complexity of the infrastructure components. Based on several distance calculations a location estimation algorithm is used to compute the position of an unknown node. The algorithms differ in their complexity, expressed by the need of computation time, and in the achievable accuracy of the position estimation. Experimental results in a real life indoor scenario with 2.4 GHz RF transceivers and multipath fading channels show that an approximative location estimation algorithm like an extended centroid localization method can reach a higher accuracy than an exact mathematic least squares approach, even though the resource-aware centroid localization method has a significant lower complexity than the least squares approach.