Design of an indoor positioning and tracking algorithm for wireless sensor networks

Today, positioning techniques like GPS already has satisfied performance in outdoor environment, but there are many problems in indoor positioning, and some conventional methods for indoor positioning also have their disadvantage. In order to overcome these problems and find a better performance over these methods, we proposed a new positioning and tracking method. It is based on the wireless sensor networks deployed in an area, and uses the path loss model. In positioning we estimate the distance of each sensor to the target, then form the circular equation and finely use the last sensor to get the estimated coordinate of the target. Besides, we modified the simple method for distance estimation to overcome the influence brought by environment. In tracking we combine the location of former and latter time index to smooth the path. In the end, we've done many simulations and proved that our method performs better while comparing with the location fingerprinting method. Because of the low computational complexity, high accuracy and the applicability to different environment, it can be used in many practical applications.