Open Access

ARTICLE

Experimental Evaluation of Trilateration-Based Outdoor Localization with LoRaWAN

by Saeed Ahmed Magsi^1,2,*, Mohd Haris Bin Md Khir¹, Illani Bt Mohd Nawi¹, Muath Al Hasan³, Zaka Ullah³, Fasih Ullah Khan⁴, Abdul Saboor⁵, Muhammad Aadil Siddiqui^1,2

1 Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS, Seri Iskandar, 32610, Malaysia
2 Balochistan University of Information Technology, Engineering, and Management Sciences, Quetta, 37500, Pakistan
3 College of Engineering, Al Ain University, Al Ain, 64141, United Arab Emirates
4 Department of Technology, The University of Lahore, Lahore, 54000, Pakistan
5 High Performance Cloud Computing Centre (HPC3), Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS, Seri Iskandar, 32610, Malaysia

* Corresponding Author: Saeed Ahmed Magsi. Email:

Computers, Materials & Continua 2023, 75(1), 845-862. https://doi.org/10.32604/cmc.2023.033636

Received 23 June 2022; Accepted 26 October 2022; Issue published 06 February 2023

Abstract

Long Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN) in the Internet of Things (IoT) domain has been the subject of interest for researchers. There is an increasing demand to localize these IoT devices using LoRaWAN due to the quickly growing number of IoT devices. LoRaWAN is well suited to support localization applications in IoTs due to its low power consumption and long range. Multiple approaches have been proposed to solve the localization problem using LoRaWAN. The Expected Signal Power (ESP) based trilateration algorithm has the significant potential for localization because ESP can identify the signal’s energy below the noise floor with no additional hardware requirements and ease of implementation. This research article offers the technical evaluation of the trilateration technique, its efficiency, and its limitations for the localization using LoRa ESP in a large outdoor populated campus environment. Additionally, experimental evaluations are conducted to determine the effects of frequency hopping, outlier removal, and increasing the number of gateways on localization accuracy. Results obtained from the experiment show the importance of calculating the path loss exponent for every frequency to circumvent the high localization error because of the frequency hopping, thus improving the localization performance without the need of using only a single frequency.

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Keywords

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