Locating zigbee® nodes using the ti®s cc2431 location engine

Abstract

In this paper, we analyze and describe the achievable performance of a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) testbed platform, which has been deployed at the Center of Excellence DEWS (University of L'Aquila, Italy) for positioning applications, and which is implemented using CC2431 sensor nodes developed by Texas Instruments® (TI)/Chipcon. In particular, we will report on an extensive campaign of measurements aiming at analyzing the performance of the CC2431's hardware location-finder engine when localization needs to be performed in a realistic and dynamic indoor propagation environment. Experimental results will show that the need of site-specific parameters for the correct operation of the location engine may severely reduce the localization accuracy of the system in dynamic environments. A simple solution to counteract this problem will also be introduced, and the related improvement will be quantified via experiments.