CHAPTER 15
ENABLING LOCALIZATION SERVICES IN SINGLE AND MULTIHOP WIRELESS NETWORKS
15.1 INTRODUCTION
Localization is the process of determining the physical positions of devices with a specific degree of accuracy in indoor or outdoor environments. The physical location of a user, device, or mote within an area covered by a wireless network can prove to be a very useful or even indispensable functionality in many applications. First of all, high correlation between data captured—for instance, environmental— and locality may be required for the data to be meaningful. Device tracking, involving location and bearing, is another type of application that makes use of different localization techniques. Location awareness is also the basic component of a special category of routing protocols, namely, geographic aware ones, where the traffic is relayed to or from a particular area of the sensing field. Finally, context-aware applications can make smarter decisions in terms of user interface or behavior when knowledge of the physical location of the nodes is available.
This chapter reviews the most representative and reliable localization techniques, most of which can be easily deployed in existing networks, as well as presents how these have been expanded to provide localization solutions suitable for environments where mostly multihop ...
