Advanced Sensor Based Positioning and Monitoring System
- Paper ID
20428
- author
- company
Budapest University of Technology and Economics
- country
Hungary
- year
2014
- abstract
Positioning and monitoring services will have emergent role in the next years. As part of these services, the wireless sensor networks could play a critical role. With advancement in research and technology, many mobile sensor systems have been developed with different geometries, sizes, and configurations. Our advanced concept for sensor based positioning and monitoring system could be applied either in Earth environment (as an integrated satellite based services) or in exploration missions beyond Earth. The combination of satellites and mobile sensors makes the remote monitoring of non-easily accessible areas in Earth environment possible. As for the exploration, very expensive and sensitive multifunctional robots with wheels or tracks were sent to other planet up to the present day. However, in the future hundreds or thousands of cheap sensors can be dropped on the surface of distance orbits. As an integrated approach, we have proposed a monitoring network which is based on a satellite segment and a wireless sensor based ground network. The developed architecture can localize its elements with minimal required resources. For the position estimation process among the sensors, we used a recursive technique that extends the accessible coverage area deploying only three high performance devices with accurate positions that are used as initial references. We developed new algorithms to improve the precision of the recursive positioning scheme utilized in the proposed sensor network. Two types of sensors are used in the ground network. The first type is deployed in large number and it is responsible for collecting and forwarding environmental data, while the other type of devices consists of high performance sensors, which are able to communicate with satellites. The environment of data measurement is a significant issue, so the positioning of sensors is a central subject in this research. The position estimation is mainly based on received signal strength values of the radio communication that is influenced by terrain obstruction therefore the Deygout propagation model was used. The surface and environmental characteristics that influence the mobility and communication of mobile device was taken into account as well. In order to analyze the introduced sensor network architecture and evaluate its operation, a simulator tool was implemented. In the evaluation of the proposed model, we analyzed the performances of different positioning algorithms in our simulator. Based on our results, an integrated service for satellite based remote sensing and positioning could be implemented.