RSS-Ratio for enhancing performance of RSS-based applications

Wei Cheng, Kefeng Tan, Victor Omwando, Jindan Zhu, Prasant Mohapatra

Abstract: RSS (Received Signal Strength) has been widely utilized in wireless applications. It is, however, susceptible to environmental unknowns from both temporal and spatial domains. As a result, the fluctuation of RSS may degrade performance of RSS based applications. In this work, we propose a novel RSS processing method at the receiver for three antenna based systems. The output of our approach is `RSS-Ratio', which eliminates the environmental unknowns and thus is a more stable variable compared to RSS itself. To validate the efficacy of the proposed method, we conduct a series of experiments in a range of wireless scenarios, including indoor laptop based measurement, indoor software defined radio - WARP based measurement, and outdoor wireless measurement. In addition, we also give an analysis to the relationship between the location of transmitter and the value of RSS-Ratio, and examine the accuracy of the estimated RSS-Ratio value via both simulations and experiments. All the experimental, analytical, and simulated results demonstrate that RSS-Ratio will be a better replacement for RSS to improve the performance of RSS based applications.