Skip to main content
  • Research Article
  • Open access
  • Published:

Application of Beamforming in Wireless Location Estimation

Abstract

A simple technique to estimate the position of a given mobile source inside a building is based on the received signal strength. For this methodology to have a reasonable accuracy, radio visibility of the mobile by at least three access points is required. To reduce the number of the required access points and therefore simplify the underlying coverage design problem, we propose a novel scheme that takes into account the distribution of RF energy around the receiver. In other words, we assume that the receiver is equipped with a circular array antenna with beamforming capability. In this way, the spatial spectrum of the received power can be measured by electronically rotating the main lobe around the 360-degree field of view. This spatial spectrum can be used by a single receiver as a means for estimating the position of the mobile transmitter. In this paper, we investigate the feasibility of this methodology, and show the improvement achieved in the positioning accuracy.

References

  1. Hightower J, Borriello G: Location systems for ubiquitous computing. IEEE Computer Magazine 2001, 34(8):57–66.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. Bahl P, Padmanabhan VN: RADAR: an in-building RF-based user location and tracking system. Proceedings of the 19th Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies (INFOCOM '00), March 2000, Tel Aviv, Israel 2: 775–784.

    Google Scholar 

  3. Ladd AM, Bekris KE, Marceau G, Rudys A, Wallach DS, Kavraki LE: Using wireless ethernet for localization. Proceedings of IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and System (IROS '02), September-October 2002 1: 402–408.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Ladd AM, Bekris KE, Rudys AP, Wallach DS, Kavraki LE: On the feasibility of using wireless ethernet for indoor localization. IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation 2004, 20(3):555–559. 10.1109/TRA.2004.824948

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Elnahrawy E, Li X, Martin RP: The limits of localization using signal strength: a comparative study. Proceedings of 1st Annual IEEE Communications Society Conference on Sensor and Ad Hoc Communications and Networks (SECON '04), October 2004, Santa Clara, Calif, USA 406–414.

    Google Scholar 

  6. Hashemi H: The indoor radio propagation channel. Proceedings of the IEEE 1993, 81(7):943–968. 10.1109/5.231342

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Spencer QH, Jeffs BD, Jensen MA, Swindlehurst AL: Modeling the statistical time and angle of arrival characteristics of an indoor multipath channel. IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications 2000, 18(3):347–360. 10.1109/49.840194

    Article  Google Scholar 

  8. Ertel RB, Cardieri P, Sowerby KW, Rappaport TS, Reed JH: Overview of spatial channel models for antenna array communication systems. IEEE Personal Communications 1998, 5(1):10–22. 10.1109/98.656151

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Fortune SJ, Gay DM, Kernighan BW, Landron O, Valenzuela RA, Wright MH: WISE design of indoor wireless systems: practical computation and optimization. IEEE Computational Science and Engineering 1995, 2(1):58–68. 10.1109/99.372944

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. Valenzuela RA, Landron O, Jacobs DL: Estimating local mean signal strength of indoor multipath propagation. IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology 1997, 46(1):203–212. 10.1109/25.554753

    Article  Google Scholar 

  11. Rubner Y, Tomasi C, Guibas LJ: A metric for distributions with applications to image databases. The 6th International Conference on Computer Vision, January 1998, Bombay, India 59–66.

    Google Scholar 

  12. Edgar GA: Measure, Topology, and Fractal Geometry. Springer UTM, New York, NY, USA; 1995.

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  13. Agarwal PK, Sharir M: Efficient algorithms for geometric optimization. ACM Computing Surveys 1998, 30(4):412–458. 10.1145/299917.299918

    Article  Google Scholar 

  14. Huttenlocher DP, Rucklidge WJ: A multi-resolution technique for comparing images using the Hausdorff distance. Proceedings of IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR '93), June 1993, New York, NY, USA 705–706.

    Google Scholar 

  15. Rucklidge WJ: Efficiently locating objects using the Hausdorff distance. International Journal of Computer Vision 1997, 24(3):251–270. 10.1023/A:1007975324482

    Article  Google Scholar 

  16. Kullback S, Leibler RA: On information and sufficiency. Annals of Mathematical Statistics 1951, 22: 79–86. 10.1214/aoms/1177729694

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  17. Stylianou Y, Syrdal AK: Perceptual and objective detection of discontinuities in concatenative speech synthesis. Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP '01), May 2001, Salt Lake City, Utah, USA

    Google Scholar 

  18. Goldberger J, Gordon S, Greenspan H: An efficient image similarity measure based on approximations of KL-divergence between two Gaussian mixtures. Proceedings of 9th IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision, October 2003, Nice, France 1: 487–493.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  19. Niculescu D, Nath B: VOR base stations for indoor 802.11 positioning. Proceedings of the 10th Annual International Conference on Mobile computing and networking (MobiCom '04), September–October 2004, Philadelphia, Pa, USA 58–69.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Kamran Sayrafian-Pour.

Rights and permissions

Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 International License ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0 ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Sayrafian-Pour, K., Kaspar, D. Application of Beamforming in Wireless Location Estimation. EURASIP J. Adv. Signal Process. 2006, 051673 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1155/ASP/2006/51673

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Revised:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1155/ASP/2006/51673

Keywords