Experimental Evaluation of Trilateration-Based Outdoor Localization with LoRaWAN

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 local-ization 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 expo-nent 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.

Automated summary

Long Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN) in the Internet of Things (IoT) domain has attracted significant research interest for its potential in localization of IoT devices. It is well-suited for IoT localization applications due to its low power consumption and long range. This article evaluates the trilateration technique using Expected Signal Power (ESP) for localization in a large outdoor campus environment, and examines the impact of frequency hopping, outlier removal, and increasing the number of gateways on localization accuracy.