Human-Induced Effects on RSS Ranging Measurements for Cooperative Positioning

We present experimental evaluations of human-induced perturbations on received-signal-strength-(RSS-) based ranging measurements for cooperative mobile positioning. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first attempt to gain insight and understand the impact of both body loss and hand grip on the RSS for enhancing proximity measurements among neighbouring devices in cooperative scenarios. Our main contribution is represented by experimental investigations. Analysis of the errors introduced in the distance estimation using path-loss-based methods has been carried out. Moreover, the exploitation of human-induced perturbations for enhancing the final positioning accuracy through cooperative schemes has been assessed. It has been proved that the effect of cooperation is very limited if human factors are not taken into account when performing experimental activities.