A Two-Layered Deployment Scheme for Wireless Sensor Network based Location Tracking

The tracking of objects and humans has recently received a lot of attention as a tool to improve business processes, occupational, and public safety. In wireless sensor networks location information is needed to put sensor readings into geographical context. In industrial environments wireless sensor networks can facilitate deployment of tracking applications as they can establish a standalone communication infrastructure (so called mesh networks). Nevertheless the communication infrastructure and thus the tracking applications rely on radio transmission. Therefore problems like ambiguous locations and the neighboring-room problem known from other radio-based tracking solutions may occur. We propose a two layered deployment scheme for wireless sensor networks to overcome these limitations. It consists of a robust communication layer and a flexible location layer, which enable per room accuracy. Such accuracy is sufficient for many types of tracking applications.