A Survey on Wireless Transmitter Localization Using Signal Strength Measurements

Abstract

Knowledge of deployed transmitters’ (Tx) locations in a wireless network improves many aspects of network management. Operators and building administrators are interested in locating unknown Txs for optimizing new Tx placement, detecting and removing unauthorized Txs, selecting the nearest Tx to offload traffic onto it, and constructing radio maps for indoor and outdoor navigation. This survey provides a comprehensive review of existing algorithms that estimate the location of a wireless Tx given a set of observations with the received signal strength indication. Algorithms that require the observations to be location-tagged are suitable for outdoor mapping or small-scale indoor mapping, while algorithms that allow most observations to be unlocated trade off some accuracy to enable large-scale crowdsourcing. This article presents empirical evaluation of the algorithms using numerical simulations and real-world Bluetooth Low Energy data.