A Crowd-Based Efficient Fault-Proof Localization System for IoT and MCS

In this paper, an efficient and fault-proof active node selection approach for localization tasks in Internet of Things (IoT) and Mobile Crowd Sensing (MCS) systems is proposed. The proposed approach is resilient to the presence of anomalous nodes. Localization is the process of fusing data readings from multiple sensing nodes with the aim of finding the location of a specific target, such as radiation source, forest fires and noisy areas. Current active node selection systems for localization tasks perform algorithms like greedy and genetic methods over the whole Area of Interest (AoI). As such, a system that considers anomalous data is required to detect anomalies and perform localization over a large number of active nodes, which usually takes multiple iterations and is computationally costly. To overcome this, we propose a resilient localization approach which a) uses the median filter based image filtering technique to level out anomalous readings, b) uses the filtered readings to reduce the AoI to be around the target location without being influenced by anomalous nodes, c) detects and eliminates anomalies in the new AoI based on the deviation between filtered readings and original readings, and d) selects remaining nodes in new AoI for localization. As a result, there is a huge reduction in the complexity of active node selection and thus reduction in time taken by the system to perform the task of source localization. The efficacy of the proposed system is evaluated for radiation source localization tasks using simulated radiation dataset, by performing experiments for several test scenarios. The results demonstrate that the system is able to perform localization tasks in significantly reduced time and therefore generate near real-time results while also maintaining low localization error.