Event localization in wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks have important military and civilian applications where determining the geographical location of a specific event is crucial. High-accuracy event localization is a challenging task that depends on the type of event to track. Hence, this work proposes a general approach for achieving event localization in wireless sensor networks, keeping independence from the kind of signals emitted by such events. The proposed approach estimates the distance between an event and a sensor node according to the intensity of the signal perceived by that sensor. In addition, lateration and fingerprinting techniques are implemented to determine the location of particular events. In order to evaluate our proposal, acoustic event localization is implemented in a real wireless sensor network based on the Arduino hardware. Results from this specific implementation show an event localization error of approximately 0.2 m inside a 2×2 m area.