Design, simulation and measurement of an accurate wireless sensor network localization system

Wireless sensor network (WSN) motes are devices of small form factor. Tailoring WSNs towards a specific application domain leads to resource constraints due to limited use of hardware and especially bandwidth and energy. Furthermore, system aspects of interaction of different components and services lead to a number of further non-functional constraints and especially timing and memory issues. Though several resources of related work exist that are dealing with localization for WSNs, there are no suitable approaches yet for how to optimize 3D localization accuracy with subject to conserving real-time aspects, memory footprint and power dissipation at the same time. It has also not yet been described how 1D, 2D and 3D errors each relate to one another in experimentation. We present an approach that allows designing, prototyping and improving scalable localization systems for mote-class devices. We implement a localization system on networks of Mica2 motes for which the 3D position accuracy error has been validated to be below 30 cm in real world settings. The paper presents ways to model, simulate, implement and measure the system model, used components' power dissipation and energy balance impact, timing behavior, memory footprint, robustness and accuracy. Statistical means of simulation results' accuracy are compared to real-world measurements' statistics