An Efficient Indoor and Outdoor Localization Method Based on RSSI using Zigbee Modules

In many wireless sensor area networks (WSNs), finding the localization of the corresponding wireless nodes is one of the fundamental challenges. Since different types of data are transmitted among the sensor nodes, the overall communication system can only succeed if the location of each node is correctly determined for WSN applications. Moreover, with respect to wireless channel models, the received signal strength indicator (RSSI) yields a distance function. This term can thus be utilized to efficiently evaluate the distance between any two nodes. In this paper, a pair of Zigbee-based modules were used to determine the RSSI and measure the distance between them for outdoor and indoor environments. Since the Radio Frequency (RF) signal can be affected by environments, we measured the reference RSSI (dBm) at a distance of 1 meter experimentally and also evaluated the path loss exponent (α) to ensure the accuracy of the proposed technique. However, in the case of the indoor experiment, a higher error was observed compared to the outdoor environment due to the presence of physical objects as reflectors, resulting in less accuracy. The presented localization method offers a reasonable distance measurement within the range of 20 to 40 meters for outdoor and 10 to 40 meters for indoor environments.