Improving the performance of RSS detection using wireless open-source platforms

Received signal strength (RSS) is a measurement of the power of received radio signal. Although RSS technique is implemented in many types of hardware, such as Network Information Cards (NICs) and smart phones, its detection performance may be disappointing due to various environmental factors and hardware design complexity. In this paper, the performance of RSS detection is enhanced in terms of accuracy and stability based on wireless open-source platforms. To construct accurate RSS mappings projected for specific RSS detection platforms, two data-fitting models are built and evaluated after conducting rigorous experiments. In addition, a four-antenna RSS evaluation approach is also proposed to combat the effects of complex environmental factors by selecting reliable samples. The experiment results demonstrate that the proposed approaches are more efficient in improving the performance of RSS detection than the traditional single-antenna approach.