A light-weight and scalable localization technique using mobile acoustic source

Sensor node localization is a basic and important part in constructing sensor networks. Among the techniques for localization, much research has been conducted using acoustics as the primary data source because of its high accuracy. However existing methods use either additional high-priced hardware or centralized processing, which increases system load and requires prior scheduling to account for acoustic timing events. In this paper we propose a novel technique which allows nodes that have ordinary acoustic sensors to independently calculate their own position, using arbitrarily occurring acoustic events. The advantages conferred by this technique include reduced energy consumption, reduced cost of system design, and the ability to design the acoustic event to match user requirements, which increases practicality of design, construction, and deployment. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this method by providing performance analyses obtained from an actual implementation.