Self-Deployable Indoor Localization With Acoustic-Enabled IoT Devices Exploiting Participatory Sensing

Indoor localization has witnessed a rapid development in the past few decades. Tremendous solutions have been put forwarded in the literature and the localization accuracy has reach an unprecedent centimeter-level. Among the available approaches, acoustic-enabled solutions have attracted much attention. They customarily achieve decimeter-level localization accuracy with affordable infrastructure costs. However, there still exist several open issues for the acoustic-based approaches which prohibit their wide-scale adoptions. First, although extra infrastructures (i.e., beacons) are economical, deployment, and maintenance can incur excessive labor cost. Second, current approaches have much latency to obtain a location fix, making it infeasible for mobile target tracking. Third, the localization performance of current solutions degrades easily by the near-far problem, multipath effect, and device diversity. To address these issues, this paper presents an asynchronous acoustic-based localization system with participatory sensing. We leverage the collaborative efforts of the participatory users who are relatively stationary in indoor environments as virtual anchors (VAs) to eliminate the predeployment and post-maintenance costs incurred in traditional anchor-based solutions. To mitigate the latency to obtain a location fix, we design an orthogonal ranging mechanism to enable concurrent beacon message transmission, which is $2\boldsymbol \times $ faster than previous work in obtaining a location fix. Moreover, we propose a robust method to address the near-far problem and device diversity, and we conquer the multipath problem via a genetic algorithm-based approach. Our VA-based system is self-deployable, cost-effective, and robust to environmental dynamics. We have implemented and evaluated a system prototype, demonstrating a median accuracy of 0.98 m in typical indoor settings.