Ad-hoc Localization in Urban District

In this paper, we present a range-free ad-hoc localization algorithm called UPL (Urban Pedestrians Localization), for positioning mobile nodes in urban district. The design principle of UPL is two-fold. (1) We assume that location seeds are deployed sparsely due to deployment-cost constraints. Thus most mobile nodes cannot expect to meet these location seeds frequently. Therefore, each mobile node in UPL relies on location information received from its neighboring mobile nodes in order to estimate its area of presence. The area of presence of each mobile node becomes inexact as it moves, but it is helpful to reduce the areas of presence of the other mobile nodes. (2) To predict the area of presence of mobile nodes accurately under mobility, we employ information about obstacles such as walls, and present an algorithm to calculate the movable areas of mobile nodes considering obstacles. This also helps to reduce each node´s area of presence. The experimental results have shown that by the above two ideas UPL could achieve 8 m positioning error in average with 10 m of radio range.