Evaluation of the reliability of RSSI for indoor localization

In wireless sensor networks, nodes can be static or mobile, depending on the application requirements. Dealing with mobility can pose some formidable challenges in protocol design, particularly, at the link and network layers. These difficulties require mobility adaption algorithms to efficiently localize mobile nodes and predict the quality of link that can be established with these nodes. An off the shelf development platform that uses Radio Signal Strength Indication (RSSI) is mostly selected as the sensor localization method, especially in the indoor environment. Despite this, not much research work has been done to practically demonstrate the reliability of RSSI for indoor localization. Therefore, in this paper, we aim to calibrate and map RSSI to distance by doing a series of experiments. The result shows that the RSSI technology gives an unacceptable high error and thus is not reliable for the indoor sensor localization.