A Practical Indoor Localization Scheme for Disaster Relief

Indoor localization technique is very helpful for rescuing people in disaster relief. However, since the existing communication facilities may shut down and the indoor environment can be changed (damaged) under disaster conditions, the traditional localization scheme is likely to cause a large estimation error and even may not work. In this paper, we propose a new indoor localization scheme for disaster relief. The proposed localization scheme is composed of two phases: in the first (off-line) phase, the target area is divided into several subareas; in the second (online) phase, the scheme finds out the subarea where the target node locates. Because the proposed scheme does not require any pre-measurement of radio characteristics between points in the target building, it is very useful from the practical point of view. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme provides a higher localization accuracy compared with the existing approach. In addition, the experimental results verify the feasibility of the proposed scheme in practice.