Mobility enhanced localization in outdoor environments

There is recently an increasing interest in applications based on localization of mobile objects in outdoor environment. Many existing localization solutions rely primarily on a hybrid wireless network-dead reckoning (DR) scheme, as the regular wireless network can hardly estimate a position with satisfactory accuracy in bad channel conditions. However, the DR can involve considerable hardware investments and operating costs, moreover, it suffers from serious error accumulations in motion measurements of the object. To remedy drawbacks of the hybrid scheme, we present a mobility enhanced localization (MEL), in which the mobile object serves as a pseudo beacon. The proposed scheme enables network localization in those areas where traditional wireless networks may not work, and thus, avoids large investments the special hardware cost and error accumulations of DR. We further propose a weighted preprocessing method for classical localization algorithms, since theoretical analysis shows that they fail to consider some boundary conditions. Extensive real world Global Positioning System (GPS) experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed MEL scheme. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.