Lessons from Developing and Deploying the Cricket Indoor Location System

The Cricket indoor location project has been active for four years. We have developed three different versions of the system. The first version was an early proofof-concept (Cricket v0), which led to the first prototype (Cricket v1). Cricket v1 has seen extensive use by us and by a few other research groups in the community. During this time, we have learned a number of lessons from application designers, users, and system maintainers. We break these lessons into platform flexibility, where we discuss the Cricket API, embedded software platform, and hardware interfaces; location accuracy, where we discuss Cricket v1’s performance and limitations, and deployment issues, where we discuss energy consumption and system management. We discuss how these lessons have helped improve the design of the next generation of Cricket, Cricket v2, whose key features we detail. Like Cricket v1, the Cricket v2 hardware design and software will be released as open-source; v2 units will also be commercially available by early 2004. We believe that the lessons described in this paper will be useful to people interested in building or using indoor location systems.