International Journal of Engineering Trends and Technology (IJETT) – Volume X Issue Y- November 2016

A Novel Prototype for Localization of

Misplaced Objects Using Internet of Things
Deepthi Grandhi#1, Krishna Prasad Satamraju*2
#
Post Graduate Student, *Assistant Professor, Department of ECE, Vasireddy Venkatadri Institute of
Technology, Namburu, Guntur (dt), Andhra Pradesh, India

1
[email protected]
2
[email protected]

Abstract — In the recent years, tracking the namely active tags, passive tags, and semi-passive
misplaced objects within the home has become a tags. An active tag has its own power source
good research area. This is very useful for the (battery) and RFID system using such a tag is called
development of smart homes. Things such as wallets, Active RFID system. Passive tags need external
keys etc. are often misplaced and it will be power for their operation and systems that use these
troublesome to find them. Such objects can be tags are called Passive RFID systems. Passive RFID
identified using these systems. There are many tags cannot initiate communication. Ontology based
systems existed to perform this task. These systems solution for Smart Homes is proposed in [6].
exhibit location accuracy of about 10 – 15 cm. But Solutions based on ontology alone are best suited in
there are no methods that give a meaningful laboratory experimentation. They are not suitable for
description about exact location of the object. This general applications because of the complexity in the
paper attempts to develop a localization system system design, cost, accuracy and usability.
which is used to locate the lost objects using Internet
of Things architecture. The system uses Wi-Fi
technology to connect to the Internet. The prototype II. LITERATURE REVIEW
developed is easy to integrate with latest smart There are many studies that have demonstrated the
phone technology. The solution developed is indoor localization systems. But, most of them faced
accurate and can be improved to use in the field of different real-time difficulties and hence are still in
logistics and military applications prototype stage. GPS cannot be used for indoor
localization because of its accuracy deviation is
Keywords — Internet of Things, Localization, almost 3m and indoor localization demands more
Tracking, Wi-Fi. accuracy. There are six important characteristics that
need to be satisfied by the localization system.
I. INTRODUCTION A. Accuracy The indoor environments differ
Ubiquitous computing helps in improving in sizes and shapes of the rooms. Therefore
the standards of daily living of human beings and accuracy of 1 meter is required and this is
assists them to build smarter homes. The ubiquitous
exploited in [7] and [8].
computing has the ability in managing objects at
home and enables real-time searching of objects. B. No Line-of-Sight There are many objects in
Global Positioning System (GPS) is considered to be between within a room and hence it is not
the choice for localization in the outdoor scenarios. possible to have line-of-sight. Therefore we
But, GPS is poor in terms of accuracy and precision need to device technologies that work in
in the indoor environments [1], [2]. Many different such environments.
wireless technologies have been experimented in this C. Economy These systems need to be of low-
area of research such as Infrared, Bluetooth, WLAN
cost as the cost always plays a role in the
(IEEE 802.11), ultrasonic, RFID, Zigbee etc. RFID
technology proved to be the technology apt for the implementation and usage.
localization system [3] because of its less overhead. D. Flexibility Systems must be designed in
This RFID augmented with IoT can give the best such a way that these systems can be used
solution [4] and in [5] a study related to smart home in any environment with little or no
systems has been presented by Song et al. modifications.
E. Non-intrusiveness The system should not
The RFID system is comprised of two parts RFID
disturb the normal objects used in daily life.
tags that act as transponder and RFID readers that
act as detectors. There are three types of RFID tags

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 International Journal of Engineering Trends and Technology (IJETT) – Volume X Issue Y- November 2016

F. Usability It should be easy to develop the

system. The systems developed will have
different levels of accuracy and one should
fall in usable accuracy range in order to
implement it.

For over the years, the RFID technology is the

spearhead for the research work in this domain.
Most of the characteristics required for localization
are present in this technology. Fields like Fig. 1 Proposed system overview
aeronautics, engineering and medicine are using this
technology [9]. The solution proposed by Tesoriero The system uses the Internet of Things
et al. [10] gives a method that uses a virtual map architecture as shown in Fig. 2. As we can see, there
with the actual room and identifies the physical are seven layers in this model. Layer – 1 is called the
location of the tracking object from its position on Things layer which normally comprises of sensors,
the virtual map. Almaaitah et.al [11] proposed two microcontrollers and other devices which gather
methods for 3D localization of a passive RFID tag. information from the physical environment. The
The first method is Adaptive Power Multilateration second layer is the communication protocols layer
(APM) that uses four RFID tags and localizes the tag that provides gateway to the data transfer. This is the
based on the minimal interrogation power and backbone of the system. The protocols like TCP/IP,
multilateration. The second method is Adaptive and other protocols can be used in this layer. The
Power with Antenna Array (APAA) that uses a protocols supported by various hardware and other
single RFID tag equipped with both horizontal and devices can be used here. This layer is the key in
vertical antennas. Both methods give an accuracy of interfacing the objects with the external world. The
0.38m and 0.48 m respectively. next layers Data Ingestion and Data analysis provide
with storage and management. This layer in general
Saad et al. [12] proposed another 2D solution also referred to as cloud, where data is stored and
that attaches reader to the tracking object. The allows access to this data at any instant of time from
passive RFID tags are placed along the object path anywhere. Data security is also provided in this layer
as reference tags. Yuhong and Ya [13] provided to protect the data from unauthorized access.
another 2D solution that calculates the coordinates Techniques like encryption and decryption are used
of the tracked passive RFID tag based on Angle of in this layer. Data integrity and authenticity is
Arrival. Brchan et al. [14] proposed another active maintained in this layer.
RFID based sD solution with extension to 3D. In
[15], DiGiampaolo and Martinelli proposed a In the upper two layers, custom applications can be
passive RFID tag based system that uses a Quantized developed using Android Application development
Extended Kalman Filter for distance measurements. and other applications can also be designed to
Han et al. [16] proposed a 3D localization solution perform post data analysis from the data in the
based on active reference tags in 1m. This algorithm cloud. Many applications have been developed using
uses antennas and filter methods are applied to this data in various fields depending upon the
measure the distance between the tag and reader. requirements. The process layer is used to take
decisions based on the results obtained from the
This paper proposes a prototype used for analysis of data. There are varieties of applications
localization of easily lost objects based on Wi-Fi and developed in this layer ranging from turning on/off a
uses Internet of Things architecture. relay to motion control of space crafts. Applications
built on services and process in the cloud are gaining
huge response from various markets such as
III.SYSTEM DESIGN consumer electronics, medical, smart living and
smart agriculture.
Fig. 1 shows the overall system view of the
proposed system. The system contains a centralized Fig. 3 shows the block diagram of the
server which is used as a database to store the data proposed prototype. The Wi-Fi module is attached to
related to the localization. Technology we are using every object required to track. This Wi-Fi module is
is Wi-Fi as it is the best suited technology when it configured in station mode. This module using any
comes to Internet of Things. D1, D2, D3 and D4 are access point will get connected to the internet to
devices connected to the server through wire or access the central server. The application server
wireless. We are using wireless technology. The running on the server place will continuously listen
device uses IoT architecture in its design. to the incoming data and directs it into the database
where data is stored permanently and various tools

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 International Journal of Engineering Trends and Technology (IJETT) – Volume X Issue Y- November 2016

are available to analyze this data. The clients can

access to the web server to access the data stored in ecommended font sizes are shown in Table 1.
the database. In order to access the web-server for
data, proper authentication must be made. This will IV. RESULTS
help to avoid unauthorized access to the data.
The experimentation is done using a NodeMCU
microcontroller that has an inherent Wi-Fi module.
The device is compact and has many digital pins and
analog pins for connecting different devices and
sensors. It has 9 digital pins and 1 analog pin with
built-in ADC (Analog-to-Digital Converter).
ESP8266 is the Wi-Fi module that comes built-in
with NodeMCU. The ESP8266 was manufactured
by Expressif, China. It has built-in Tensilicon 32-bit
microcontroller that runs at 80MHz. It has 4 MB
flash that can be used to flash program. It is cheaper
and yet very powerful microcontroller.

To store the object information in the cloud, a

stream is created at data.sparkfun.com/local_obj.
Fig. 2 Internet of Things 7 – Layer Reference Model This stream will store the information in the cloud
periodically. During our experiments, we have
considered two objects with IDs D1002 and D1012.
We tried to change the location of objects within the
house. We continuously post this data onto the cloud
and this data stored in the cloud can be accessed by
the legitimate user from anywhere around the world
using the public key. Private key is required to
modify or delete the data. In this way, some security
is provided to the data.

V. APPLICATIONS
Fig. 3 Proposed architecture overview
Although this localization technique is suitable
for indoor objects, with some minor changes and
Fig. 4 shows the arrangement of
additional equipment, we can generate additional
the Wi-Fi modules at different locations
applications.
within the house. These tags are placed
at suitable locations and care must be
1) Military Applications
taken to see that all portions in the house
One of the major requirements of the
are covered. The radiation emitted by
military application is position of the soldier in the
these devices must be within the
war field. By making the soldiers equipped with this
permitted levels and it is advised to have
localization system, and tracking the
all the devices to be equipped with anti-
movement/location of the soldier in the war filed
radiation tags.
from a centralized monitoring room, will help the
military people to execute their plans and coordinate
amongst themselves.

2) Equipment Tracking in Organizations

In larger organizations such as universities, or
multinational companies identification of
equipment/tools will be difficult task. By attaching
these devices to the equipment we can have
continuous monitoring of these.

3) Child Tracker
Another important application related to
localization is child tracker. This device requires
Fig. 4 Wi – Fi tag placements

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 International Journal of Engineering Trends and Technology (IJETT) – Volume X Issue Y- November 2016

GPS and helps in tracking children when they are at [15] E. DiGiampaolo and F. Martinelli, "A passive UHF-RFID
system for the localization of an indoor autonomous
home or in school bus or away from home vehicle," IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics, vol.
59, pp. 3961-3970, 2012.
[16] J. Han, Y. Zhao, Y. S. Cheng, T. L. Wong, and C. H.
VI.
CONCLUSIONS Wong, "Improving Accuracy for 3D RFID Localization,"
International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks, vol.
A novel prototype for localization of misplaced 2012.
objects is developed and tested. The system is
capable of identifying the objects with minimum
error and high accuracy. The system can be used in
various applications and even can be extended to
military and logistic applications. With the
technology getting better and better every day, it is
required for people to grow up with the technologies
and make it as integral part of our daily life for a
better and smart tomorrow.

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