Experiments on Accurate Indoor Positioning Using the Whale Optimization Algorithm

The scenarios considered in this paper are examples of indoor positioning problems in industrial premises like warehouses and storage buildings. As usual in these cases, some anchor nodes are deployed at fixed and known locations near the ceiling of the considered environment to support maximum coverage and minimum interference positioning. These scenarios are critical for ordinary positioning algorithms because of the symmetries introduced by the deployment of the anchor nodes, and therefore alternative algorithms based on optimization are required. The whale optimization algorithm is considered in this paper as a viable alternative to support accurate positioning in the considered scenarios. The reported experimental campaign is designed to assess the performance of this algorithm for 2D positioning using two options to reduce the positioning problem from 3D to 2D under the assumption that ultra-wide band ranging is used to estimate distances. The first option treats the problem as genuinely 3D. The second option projects the estimated distances on the target plane to work in 2D. The results of the reported experimental campaign provide empirical evidence that the whale optimization algorithm can be effectively used for accurate 2D positioning using both options, but the second option is preferable because it requires a lower computational cost.