Performance Study of Localization Techniques in Wireless Body Area Sensor Networks

One of the major issues in Wireless Body Area Sensor Networks (WBASNs) is efficient localization. There are various techniques for indoor and outdoor environments to locate a person. This study evaluating and compares performance of optimization schemes in indoor environments for optimal placement of wireless sensors, where patients can perform their daily activities. In indoor environments, the performance comparison between Distance Vector-Hop algorithm, Ring Overlapping Based on Comparison Received Signal Strength Indicator (ROCRSSI), Particle filtering and Kalman filtering based location tracking techniques, in terms of localization accuracy is estimated. Results show that particle filtering outperforms all. GPS and several techniques based on GSM location tracking schemes are proposed for outdoor environments. Hidden Markov GSM based location tracking scheme efficiently performs among all, in terms of location accuracy and computational overheads.