RSSI based localization algorithm development and comparative study

A Real Time Locating System (RTLS) is used for tracking assets, people, objects, etc. that are the subjects of the RTLS environment in real time. The physical layer of the RTLS uses RF (radio frequency) communication and recent studies have mentioned the development of RTLS using optical or acoustic technology working in tandem with RF. Tracking of prisoners, medical equipment in a hospital, automobile tracking in a warehouse are a few applications of a RTLS. A generic RTLS usually consists of two types of RFID tags, wireless readers known as asset tags contained to the objects/persons being tracked and a set of fixed readers called location tags which help in determining the location of the asset by obtaining the RSSI value and passing it to the base station. The base station is central to the whole RTLS and is responsible for determining the position of the asset. The base station is connected to a processing center such as a PC to execute the localization algorithm and process the results. The project is centered on developing stable localization algorithms that will provide a near accurate location estimate of the asset tags in the existing setup. The current system is based out of a SIMTech lab in NTU. The proposed algorithms use multiple propagation models and CS theory to improve the system performance. The RTLS is realized completely in software which can process the RSS data from the reader and does not involve any extra components for hardware or any adjustments to the RFID tags. Based on the results, we conclude that using propagation models and tag multiplicity, the accuracy of the RTLS has improved and the performance is better than the radiomap approach used previously.Master of Scienc