An Accelerometer Based Approach for Indoor Localization

Localization in wireless sensor network is an important issue as GPS is not accessible in an indoor environment. Because coarse accuracy is sufficient for most sensor network applications, solutions in range-free localization are being pursued as a cost-effective alternative to more expensive range-based approaches. In this paper, we present an accelerometer based positioning scheme (APS) for tracking objects in indoor environments. The main idea of the APS is to compute an object's displacement by transforming the information of an accelerometer. Given an original coordinates of an object, the final position could be estimated according to the directional displacement. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method, both theoretical validation and simulations were conducted in this study. The simulation results reflect that the APS is a feasible approach in developing indoor localization with low cost and high accuracy.