A Lightweight and Robust Routing Protocol for Real-Time Indoor Localization of Emergency Responders

An Indoor Positioning System (IPS) routing protocol based on anycast is proposed for localization of emergency responders - referred to as IPS Anycast Routing (IAR). A cross-layer methodology is present in the design. This leads to IAR being extremely simple and lightweight. No dedicated routing packets are needed. Routing information is carried in the network header of data packets. The header consumes less than 1% of the total capacity. The anycast mechanism delivers a robust operation in dynamic and hostile environments. Simulation results show that the proposed routing protocol became highly scalable as the number of units increases. The route discovery and end-to-end packet delays are linearly proportional to and bounded by the network diameter. Simulation results also reveal that increasing the frequency of broadcasting position data packets does not significantly increase the speed of route discovery. A low broadcasting frequency conserves bandwidth but is slow in detecting topological changes.