Feasibility of LoRa for Smart Home Indoor Localization

Authors

Kyungki Kim, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Sining Li, City University of Hong Kong
Milad Heydariaan, University of Houston
Nour Smaoui, University of Houston
Omprakash Gnawali, University of Houston
Wonho Suh, Hanyang University
Min Jae Suh, Sam Houston State University
Jung In Kim, City University of Hong Kong

Document Type

Article

Date of this Version

1-4-2021

Citation

Kim, K.; Li, S.; Heydariaan, M.; Smaoui, N.; Gnawali, O.; Suh,W.; Suh, M.J.; Kim, J.I. Feasibility of LoRa for Smart Home Indoor Localization. Appl. Sci. 2021, 11, 415. https://doi. org/10.3390/app11010415

Comments

© 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license

Abstract

With the advancement of low-power and low-cost wireless technologies in the past few years, the Internet of Things (IoT) has been growing rapidly in numerous areas of Industry 4.0 and smart homes. With the development of many applications for the IoT, indoor localization, i.e., the capability to determine the physical location of people or devices, has become an important component of smart homes. Various wireless technologies have been used for indoor localization includingWiFi, ultra-wideband (UWB), Bluetooth low energy (BLE), radio-frequency identification (RFID), and LoRa. The ability of low-cost long range (LoRa) radios for low-power and long-range communication has made this radio technology a suitable candidate for many indoor and outdoor IoT applications. Additionally, research studies have shown the feasibility of localization with LoRa radios. However, indoor localization with LoRa is not adequately explored at the home level, where the localization area is relatively smaller than offices and corporate buildings. In this study, we first explore the feasibility of ranging with LoRa. Then, we conduct experiments to demonstrate the capability of LoRa for accurate and precise indoor localization in a typical apartment setting. Our experimental results show that LoRa-based indoor localization has an accuracy better than 1.6 m in line-of-sight scenario and 3.2 m in extreme non-line-of-sight scenario with a precision better than 25 cm in all cases, without using any data filtering on the location estimates.