Optimizing Localization Algorithms within Wireless Sensor Networks: An Australian Case Study in Environmental Monitoring

A. Kealy, M. Duckham

Abstract:	In Australia, conservation contracts (contracts issued by government to private landholders in order to support sustainable management of private land) are an essential mechanism for protecting and improving the quality of the natural environment. Because of the cost and difficulty in manually checking contract compliance, lowcost automated technologies that can provide detailed, upto- date, measurements of environmental change are of significant interest. Wireless sensor networks (WSNs, wireless networks of miniaturized, sensor-enabled computing devices) are an important emerging technology that can be used for environmental monitoring. However, WSNs currently lack the capabilities needed to efficiently gather and process spatial information, including ubiquitous localization of sensor nodes and efficient detection of spatially-extended events. This paper describes the application of WSNs to environmental monitoring. It presents some preliminary results obtained from a practical field study conducted in Victoria, Australia. It introduces the problem of localization within WSNs and proposes a solution based around decentralized, integrated filtering techniques. Preliminary results generated using simulated data indicate that compared to a centralized Kalman filtering approach, decentralized computing can provide similar accuracies of the state estimates but with significantly improved efficiency of the computation process across a large WSN. This paper discusses the assumptions underlying these algorithms and the future direction of this research with regards to taking quantitative and stochastic models of uncertain location information as well as qualitative formal models of dynamic spatial events and network topology and combining these in a robust integrated model of adaptive positioning.
Published in:	Proceedings of the 22nd International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS 2009) September 22 - 25, 2009 Savannah International Convention Center Savannah, GA
Pages:	1042 - 1049
Cite this article:	Kealy, A., Duckham, M., "Optimizing Localization Algorithms within Wireless Sensor Networks: An Australian Case Study in Environmental Monitoring," Proceedings of the 22nd International Technical Meeting of the Satellite Division of The Institute of Navigation (ION GNSS 2009), Savannah, GA, September 2009, pp. 1042-1049.
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