Wireless Technology Agnostic Real-time Localization in Urban Areas

Location estimation is a fundamental middleware for enabling location based services. Different Radio propagation models, customarily used in wireless networks planning, can be useful for localizing mobile nodes by estimating the transmitter-receiver distance from the Received Signal Strength (RSS). However, most of these localization methods need a prior knowledge of the Effective Isotropic Radiated Power (EIRP) to determine a target location and may suffer from imprecisions that can undermine the purpose of localization. In this paper, we propose a new technique called TR2S2 (Trilateration based on Ratio of Received Signal Strength). Though also based on RSS, the method improves location estimation accuracy compared to classical trilateration algorithms and does not need a knowledge of the EIRP. TR2S2 was applied using different deterministic and statistical radio propagation models in different settings. The results show that location estimation is every time more accurate than other compared methods.