APL: Autonomous passive localization for wireless sensors deployed in road networks

In road networks, sensors are deployed sparsely (hundreds of meters apart) to save costs. This makes the existing localization solutions based on the ranging be ineffective. To address this issue, this paper introduces an autonomous passive localization scheme, called APL. Our work is inspired by the fact that vehicles move along routes with a known map. Using binary vehicle-detection timestamps, we can obtain distance estimates between any pair of sensors on roadways to construct a virtual graph composed of sensor identifications (i.e., vertices) and distance estimates (i.e., edges). The virtual graph is then matched with the topology of road map, in order to identify where sensors are located in roadways. We evaluate our design outdoor in Minnesota roadways and show that our distance estimate method works well despite of traffic noises. In addition, we show that our localization scheme is effective in a road network with eighteen intersections, where we found no location matching error, even with a maximum sensor time synchronization error of 0.3 sec and the vehicle speed deviation of 10 km/h.