A comparison of time- and RSS-based radio localization for the factory floor

Wireless communication systems have many potential benefits for industrial applications, one of them being the support for mobile devices. In such scenarios, determining the position of a wireless node is an essential task which should be accomplished directly and reliably by the communication system. Two popular approaches are the received signal strength (RSS) and time-measurement methods based on signal propagation delays. In this paper, we investigate the attainable localization accuracy for both approaches based on a WLAN setup. Theory and experiments with different setups show that the time-of-flight method is far better than RSS, however at the expense of a higher implementation effort.