IEEE INTERNET OF THINGS JOURNAL, VOL. 8, NO.

13, JULY 1, 2021 10665

Adaptive Mini-Batch Gradient-Ascent-Based

Localization for Indoor IoT Networks Under
Rayleigh Fading Conditions
Ankur Pandey , Graduate Student Member, IEEE, Piyush Tiwary ,
Sudhir Kumar , Senior Member, IEEE, and Sajal K. Das , Fellow, IEEE

Abstract—Location estimation in an indoor Internet-of-Things

(IoT) environment is a challenging task due to multipath sig-
nals and obstacles that cause shadowing and fading effects, and
change the received signal power considerably. Most of the exist-
ing path-loss-based localization methods assume only a lognormal
shadowing model and ignore small scale fading effects. This
article considers a generic combined lognormal shadowing and
Rayleigh fading model for efficient localization of smart devices
in an indoor IoT environment. In particular, the maximum likeli-
hood estimate of the location and path-loss exponent (PLE), and
Cramer–Rao lower bound (CRLB) are derived. The localization
parameters are estimated using a novel adaptive mini-batch gra-
dient ascent method that maximizes the log-likelihood function
with an appropriate batch size based on the convergence fac-
Fig. 1. Effect of fading on localization in an indoor IoT environment. (LOS
tor. Hence, the proposed method addresses the challenge of an = Line of Sight; NLOS = Non-LOS).
arbitrary selection of a fixed batch size for a gradient ascent
method by utilizing this convergence factor. Performance evalua-
tion by a simulation study and real experiments from an indoor
IoT testbed provide a more accurate joint estimation of model location estimation methods are widely used owing to the
parameters and smart device localization. ubiquitous nature of opportunistic signals, such as wireless
fidelity (Wi-Fi), Bluetooth, light, acoustic and geomagnetic
Index Terms—Internet of Things (IoT), mini-batch gradient
ascent, Rayleigh fading, smart device localization. signals [1]. The RSS-based methods are low cost as they do not
require any additional hardware, and utilize the received power
at the smart devices for positioning with the help of a path-
loss model. However, a major challenge with this method is the
I. I NTRODUCTION appropriate choice of path-loss model given the dynamic envi-
OCALIZATION of smart devices in an Internet-of- ronment and shadowing effects [2]. This is because the RSS
L Things (IoT) environment is crucial for many applica-
tions, such as indoor activity recognition, health care, and
values fluctuate considerably due to fading effects, thereby
reducing the smart device localization accuracy [3].
smart agriculture. While global positioning system (GPS) is
a viable solution for outdoor localization, it either does not A. Motivation and Contributions
work in an indoor environment, or nonline-of-sight (NLOS) Wireless signals are affected by obstacles and undergo
multipath signals due to reflections from walls and furniture reflection and diffraction phenomena. Therefore, the signals
severely degrade the localization accuracy. Therefore, in an arrive at smart devices through multipath, which affects the
indoor IoT setting, the received signal strength (RSS)-based RSS values. Fig. 1 illustrates an indoor IoT environment
where the wireless signals arrive at the smart devices through
Manuscript received November 10, 2020; accepted December 23, 2020.
Date of publication December 29, 2020; date of current version June 23, 2021. multipath because of reflections from obstacles. Therefore, the
The work of Sudhir Kumar was supported in part by the project RSS-based localization methods lead to erroneous location
NRDMS/UG/S.Kumar/IIT Patna/e-04/2019 of the Department of Science and estimates if neither multipath fading effect nor the variation of
Technology, India. The work of Sajal K. Das was supported in part by
the NSF grants CNS-2008878 and SaTC-2030624. (Corresponding author: RSS values due to multipath signals is considered. When both
Ankur Pandey.) shadowing and small scale fading are considered, the maxi-
Ankur Pandey, Piyush Tiwary, and Sudhir Kumar are with the mum likelihood estimate of the location of the smart device is
Department of Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Patna,
Patna 801106, India (e-mail: 1821ee12@iitp.ac.in; piyush.ee17@iitp.ac.in; nonlinear in nature making it difficult to obtain a closed-form
sudhir@iitp.ac.in). expression. Therefore, to maximize the log likelihood function,
Sajal K. Das is with the Department of Computer Science, Missouri different localization techniques are proposed as discussed in
University of Science and Technology, Rolla, MO 65409 USA (e-mail:
sdas@mst.edu). Table I. In the proposed work, we use an adaptive gradient
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/JIOT.2020.3047982 ascent method for maximizing the log likelihood function. The
2327-4662 
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10666
TABLE I
C OMPARISON OF E XISTING RSS-BASED PLE AND S MART D EVICE
L OCATION E STIMATION M ETHODS
gradient ascent method or its variants, such as single sample,
mini-batch, and full batch require manual calibration of both
the learning rate and batch size. Smaller batch sizes (single
sample methods) converge in fewer epochs while larger batch
sizes (full batch methods) require a large number of epochs
to converge, which increases the computational complexity
of the method. Moreover, the single sample method provides
marginally lesser accuracy than the full batch due to the
noisy gradient. Such tradeoff between the accuracy and con-
vergence for gradient ascent methods, based on the batch size,
necessitates an estimation method that chooses the appropriate
batch size between the single sample and full batch meth-
ods. Given that selecting a particular batch size manually or
through the line search is computationally expensive, an adap-
tive method is required during the training process [11], [12].
This motivates our work.
We consider the fading effects and propose an adaptive
mini-batch gradient ascent method for smart device location
estimation. The proposed method utilizes the advantage of
both single sample and full batch methods by taking into
account the convergence factor, μ, and its impact on the
localization accuracy.
The algorithm starts with an initial batch size of unity,
and as the estimate is far from maximum, it approaches
the maximum faster with a single batch. Once the log-
likelihood function is near the maximum, the method achieves
a sharper maximum by increasing the batch size. However, if
the value of the log-likelihood function overshoots the maxi-
mum because of the large step size (that is, μ < 1), then the
batch size is decreased accordingly, in order to allow the log-
likelihood function attain the sharper maximum back. In this
way, the proposed method achieves both faster convergence
and higher localization accuracy, with the appropriate batch
size.
The major contributions of this article are summarized as
follows.
1) We provide a joint estimation of the path-loss exponent
(PLE) and smart device location in an indoor IoT envi-
ronment considering a combined lognormal model for
shadowing, and Rayleigh fading.
2) We propose a novel adaptive mini-batch gradient ascent-
based localization that addresses the nonlinearity of
the derived maximum likelihood function and arbi-
trary selection of fixed mini-batch size considering the
tradeoff between convergence and localization accuracy.
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IEEE INTERNET OF THINGS JOURNAL, VOL. 8, NO. 13, JULY 1, 2021
3) We derive the Cramer–Rao lower bound (CRLB) for a
Rayleigh faded IoT environment.
4) We evaluate the performance of our proposed solution
via a simulation study and real-world experiments in an
indoor IoT testbed.
The remainder of this article is organized as follows.
Section II reviews the existing localization methods and their
limitations. Section III presents the derivation of the maxi-
mum likelihood estimate under Rayleigh fading. Section IV
describes the proposed adaptive mini-batch gradient ascent
method. Sections V and VI evaluate the performance of
the proposed method via a simulation study and real-world
experiments in an indoor IoT testbed, respectively. Finally,
conclusions are drawn in Section VII.
II. R ELATED W ORK
In this section, we review the existing range-based local-
ization methods utilizing the path-loss model for PLE and
location estimation and contrast with our proposed method.
A. Localization Methods Based on Signal Measurements
Signal measurements, such as Time of Arrival (ToA) [4],
time difference of arrival (TDOA) [13], Angle of Arrival
(AoA) [14], channel state information (CSI)-based [15], and
RSS features [16] are extensively used for localization. The
RSS-based smart device localization methods are widely uti-
lized as the wireless signals are ubiquitous with proliferation of
smart devices and APs, which makes the methods low-cost [1].
Since our proposed localization method is also RSS-based,
Table I compares only the RSS-based methods (except the
Relative Location method, which also uses ToA measurement)
for PLE and location estimation.
The range-based techniques utilize the RSS values to esti-
mate the distance between a smart device and APs. This
estimated distance is used to compute the location of the
smart device using a multilateration method. The maxi-
mum likelihood method is used in [4] to estimate the smart
device location for a lognormal shadowing environment. Semi
definite programming (SDP)-based methods are proposed
in [7], [17], [18] that address the nonconvex nature of the
Maximum likelihood function, considering lognormal shad-
owing. Methods, such as [5], [6], [8], and [19] estimate the
PLE and smart device locations using weighted least square,
centroid, Bayesian, and joint estimation methods. In [20],
experiments are conducted at different sites, and it is observed
that for fixed transmitter locations, lognormal distribution
shadowing alone is not sufficient to model the RSS values,
and the authors used a compound Gamma-lognormal distri-
bution for modeling the fading characteristics for an indoor
environment. Shen et al. [10] utilized Rayleigh fading with
the log distance path-loss model to estimate the location of
APs using particle filtering and pedestrian dead reckoning
(PDR) methods. The localization performance improves with
the fusion of PDR. However, particle filtering approach is in
general nondeterministic in nature, and with an increase in the
dimensionality of the state space, a large number of particles
PANDEY et al.: ADAPTIVE MINI-BATCH GRADIENT-ASCENT-BASED LOCALIZATION FOR INDOOR IoT
Fig. 2. Overview of the proposed localization method in an indoor fading IoT environment.
are required. The method suffers from sample impoverishment
and high complexity as the particle area increases [21].
B. Shortcomings of the Existing Methods
The range-based localization methods [4], [7], [18] do
not consider the fading effect in the location estimation.
Localization methods, such as [2], [22], and [23] do consider
the effect of fading for location estimation, assuming that the
PLE is known apriori in a new environment. Hence, these
methods do not estimate the PLE on the fly. Reference [22]
utilizes a computationally expensive trilateration method for
which three APs are required. Dogandzic and Amran [2]
incorporated the expectation–maximization (EM) algorithm
for localization. However, for the M step, the method utilizes
the Newton–Raphson iteration method, which is computa-
tionally expensive. Moreover, this method does not present
results for a real-time fading environment. Similarly, [23] eval-
uates the CRLB for ToA measurements in different fading
environments but provides only numerical simulations to ver-
ify the expressions. The least-square-based methods [6], [24]
attempt to address the nonlinear nature of maximum likeli-
hood function, but is prone to shadowing effects. Adhikary
and Daigle [9] presented localization results in a Rayleigh
fading environment and compared the performance of three
standard localization methods. However, the performance was
not evaluated in a real IoT system, and the complexity is also
high. The SDP-based methods [7], [17]–[19] are computation-
ally expensive and require tight relaxations to guarantee the
convergence of maximum likelihood function. It is assumed
in [7] that the multipath fading effects can be mitigated by
averaging the RSS values in the time and frequency domains.
Hence, the method involves a preprocessing step that further
increases the complexity.
Therefore, in this article, we propose a location estima-
tion method that considers Rayleigh fading in the indoor IoT
environment, adaptively selects the batch size for the gra-
dient ascent method, and guarantees the convergence as the
maximum likelihood estimate is strongly concave.
III. M AXIMUM L IKELIHOOD E STIMATION
U NDER R AYLEIGH FADING
In this section, we consider a lognormal shadowing model
and Rayleigh fading for location estimation of unknown smart
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10667
devices. Let N denote the number of APs with known coor-
dinates ψi = [pi , qi ]T where ψi ∈ R2 , and i = 1, 2, . . . , N.
The coordinates of unknown smart devices are denoted as
θ = [x, y]T where θ ∈ R2 . The received power Pri due to
the ith AP for a shadowing PLE is given as [25]
θ − ψi 
Pri = P0 − 10η log10 +χ (1)
d0
where P0 is the reference received power at distance d0 = 1
m (θ − ψi  ≥ d0 ); η denotes the PLE that depends on
the environment; and χ denotes lognormal shadowing effect
distributed as zero-mean Gaussian variable with variance σg2 .
A. Location Estimation Under Rayleigh Fading
As discussed, two significant phenomena that degrade the
strength of wireless signals are fading and shadowing or, at
times, their coexistence. In an indoor IoT environment, signals
are received at smart devices through reflection, scattering, and
diffraction due to building walls, furniture, or any other obsta-
cles. Therefore, signals arrive at the devices through multiple
paths. As the amplitude and phase of the signal through this
multipath are random, this makes the superimposed RSS also
random in nature. Such randomness or fluctuations exist for
a short duration of time over small distances, referred to as
small scale fading [26]. The multipath effects over relatively
larger distances from a large number of scatterers give rise to
the shadowing phenomenon. This is also known as long-term
fading effect, the distribution of which is lognormal [26], [27].
In this work, we consider a lognormal-Rayleigh shadowed
fading wireless channel for smart device localization. Fig. 2
depicts an overview of the proposed method. The RSS values
are collected from the smart devices and input to the adaptive
mini-batch gradient ascent method. We consider three scenar-
ios for parameter estimation: 1) Scenario 1 assumes that the
PLE is known and estimates the location; 2) Scenario 2 esti-
mates the PLE using a few known smart device locations, and
then estimate the locations of all other smart devices; and 3)
Scenario 3 jointly estimates the PLE and smart device location.
The RSS samples are fed to the adaptive mini-batch gradi-
ent ascent method, continuing the iteration until convergence.
Finally, the parameters are estimated. The proposed method is
detailed in the rest of this section and the next section.
10668 IEEE INTERNET OF THINGS JOURNAL, VOL. 8, NO. 13, JULY 1, 2021

  N η 
N
B. Maximum Likelihood Parameters Estimation of Location i=1 θ − ψi 
 Pr
The location estimate in the presence of both lognormal = exp i

(4.34P0 )N i=1
4.34
shadowing and Rayleigh fading can be described as follows.  N

Proposition 1: The unknown location estimate z ∈ {x, y}  (θ − ψi )η
× exp −β . (9)
for a single sample due to N number of APs is given as P0
i=1
N   
 1 β  η −1  The log-likelihood function is given as
ẑs+1 = zˆs + ρ η(zˆs − ψi ) − α2 (2)
α P0 ln L(Pr ) = η ln Ni=1 θ − ψi  + κi
i=1
N

where zˆs and ẑs+1 are the current and next location estimates; (θ − ψi )η
− β − N
α = (x − pi )2 + (y − qi )2 and β = exp(Pri /4.34); ρ is the P0
i=1
learning rate; η is the PLE; ψi = [pi , qi ]T is the known location N 

of APs; and Pri is the received power due to the ith AP.  (θ − ψi )η
= η lnθ − ψi  − − β + κi
Proof: The received signal amplitude r(t) at time t with P0
i=1
carrier frequency f0 in a multipath fading environment, assum- (10)
ing all the phases λi are uniformly distributed in the range N
[0, 2π ] with amplitude ai , is given as [26] where κi = i=1 (Pri /4.34) and  = ln(4.34P0 ). Therefore,
the maximum-likelihood estimator for θ is given as
r(t) = X cos(2π f0 t) − Y sin(2π f0 t) (3) N 

N N  (θ − ψi )η
where X = i=1 ai cos(λi ), Y = i=1 ai sin(λi ), and X and θ̂ = arg max η lnθ − ψi − β . (11)
θ P0
Y follow Gaussian distribution for large N, due to central limit i=1
theorem.
√ Therefore, the envelope of the received signal E = We express the maximum likelihood function in terms of
X 2 + Y 2 will be Rayleigh distributed [28] having probability unknown location coordinates (x, y) as follows:

η  
density function (pdf)  N

 θ̂ = arg max ln (x − pi )2 + (y − qi )2
b b2 θ 2
f (b) = 2 exp − 2 , b ≥ 0 (4)  i=1
σr 2σr η 
((x − pi )2 + (y − qi )2 ) 2
where σr represents the shape parameter of the distribution. − β . (12)
P0
The power distribution for Rayleigh fading f (φ) is obtained
using the variable transformation method as φ = b2 Let us now use the gradient ascent method [29] to estimate
√ the unknown location z ∈ {x, y}. The gradient ascent estimate
φ 1 1 −φ/2σr2 using (12) with an initial estimate zˆs ∈ {xˆs , yˆs } and next esti-
f (φ) = 2 e−φ/2σr × √ =
2
e (5)
σr 2 φ 2σr2 mate ẑs+1 for a single sample due to N APs for sth iteration
The expression in (5) represents an exponential distribution. is given in (2).
Given that the mean of the standard exponential distribution In an indoor IoT scenario, a smart device receives signals
f (x; λ) = λe−λx is (1/λ), (5) yields λ = (1/2σr2 ). Hence, the from multiple APs. Therefore, we need to consider multiple
expected value E(φ) is derived as RSS samples from all the APs for location estimation. A sin-

 gle RSS sample from all the APs for parameter estimation
θ − ψi  −η leads to frequent parameter updates and a noisy gradient [30].
E(φ) = 2σr = P0
2
. (6)
d0 However, considering a full batch of samples from the N APs
Equation (6) is obtained using the mean value of the received increases the convergence time because one update requires
power from (1). Now, using (5) and (6), the pdf of the received the full batch of data. Therefore, we propose to use an adaptive
power f (ζ ) in linear scale can be written as mini-batch gradient ascent method that utilizes multiple sam-

 ples from the N APs and converges faster than the full batch
di η di η
f (ζ ) = exp −ζ (7) gradient ascent method. However, if no small scale fading is
P0 P0 considered, we use the expression given in [4] and [31] to
where ([θ − ψi /d0 ]) = di . To obtain the pdf in dB scale we compute the location of the unknown smart devices.
perform another transformation Pr = 10 log10 ζ = 4.34 ln(ζ ).
Therefore, using the transformation for a logarithm variable, IV. A DAPTIVE M INI -BATCH G RADIENT A SCENT
the pdf of the received power Pri in dB is given as L OCALIZATION


di η di η The gradient ascent method following (2) is for a single
f (Pri ) = β exp −β . (8) RSS sample. Consider N APs that provide m samples at each
4.34P0 P0
smart device. The RSS matrix is represented as
Now, for d0 = 1, the likelihood function of the received ⎡ ⎤
P11 P12 . . . P1N
power from N number of APs is given by ⎢ P21
⎢ P22 . . . P2N ⎥ ⎥

 P=⎢ . .. .. .. ⎥ . (13)
θ − ψi η
N
(θ − ψi )η ⎣ .. . . . ⎦
L(Pr ) = β exp −β
4.34P0
i=1
P0 Pm1 Pm2 . . . PmN m×N

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PANDEY et al.: ADAPTIVE MINI-BATCH GRADIENT-ASCENT-BASED LOCALIZATION FOR INDOOR IoT
The mth input sample to the batch algorithm is given by
Sm = [Pm1 , Pm2 , . . . , PmN ]. Consider a mini-batch of size B
samples where 1 ≤ B ≤ m. Therefore, the RSS matrix is
PB = [S1 , S2 , . . . , SB ]T , and the total number of mini-batches
is m
B . The location estimate of the smart device for sth iteration
using mini-batch gradient ascent for B samples is given as
ẑs+1 = zˆs + ρδz
where the average gradient δz for batch size of B samples is
1
B
δz = δSm×B
B less than 1 (that is, μ < 1). Therefore, the batch size is
m=1
and for the mth minibatch, the gradient δSm×B is given as

N likelihood function reaches near its maximum, the proposed
 
δSm×B = η zˆs − ψi (D − C)
i=1
where
β η
D = (α)−1 , C= (α) 2 −1
P0
as discussed in (2).
Equation (14) helps devise the fixed mini-batch algorithm
and requires to choose a mini-batch size B manually to com-
pute the gradient update. As there is a tradeoff between the
mini-batch size and accuracy [32], [33], the choice of B is
important. To address this issue, in the proposed method, we
define a convergence factor (μ) as the ratio of the value of
log-likelihood function for the initial and final values of a
particular epoch. Thus
max(|ln L(Pr )final |, |ln L(Pr )initial |)
μ= . (18)
min(|ln L(Pr )final |, |ln L(Pr )initial |)
We initialize with B = 1 and update the batch size as
Bi+1 = Bi × μ
until μ = 1. The estimated location of each batch acts as
an initial location estimate for the next batch, which helps
in faster convergence as well as better accuracy. The sin-
gle sample method provides the fastest convergence but with
marginally higher localization error, as only a single sample
leads to a noisy gradient and can easily deviate from the batch
gradient direction [30]. On the other hand, in the fixed batch
method, all the sample points are input at once, and the param-
eters are updated after processing the complete fixed batch of
B samples. Therefore, the convergence of the batch method
is slow, but the accuracy is better than the single sample
method. It is also observed that large mini-batches are compu-
tationally expensive, while the small batch sizes utilize fewer
memory [12]. Therefore, there is a tradeoff between conver-
gence time and accuracy for the single sample and full batch
methods.
In our proposed method, we utilize the advantages of both
the above methods by introducing the convergence factor μ,
which controls the batch size depending on the current state
of convergence. As the gradient ascent method maximizes the
log-likelihood function, after each epoch, the value of the log-
likelihood function should increase, thus implying μ > 1. We
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10669
initialize the batch size B = 1 for faster initial convergence.
As the gradient ascent proceeds, the batch size increases (as
μ > 1), thereby leading to a slower convergence rate but
higher accuracy. The advantage is that at the same time, the
log-likelihood function is already near to its maximum because
of its initialization with the batch size equal to 1, and fur-
ther requires fewer batch sizes to reach a sharper maximum.
(14) Hence, the proposed method converges faster with comparable
accuracy as compared to the fixed or full batch method.
Similarly, for the case where the maximum is missed due
to the higher learning rate, the convergence factor becomes
(15)
decreased so that the log-likelihood function again attains the
missed maximum at a faster convergence rate. As the log-
(16) method achieves a sharper maximum compromising the con-
vergence rate by increasing the batch size. However, when the
log-likelihood function is far from its maximum, the proposed
method gives priority to faster convergence rather than the
(17) sharper maximum and accordingly utilizes fewer mini-batches.
Therefore, the significant advantage of our method is fast
processing of large RSS samples from N APs with faster
convergence and a smooth gradient. The proposed method
converges for a particular batch size when μ = 1. For conver-
gence, we set the threshold value of μ − 1 ≤  between the
output of the current and next iterations (here,  = 10−5 ).
Initialization of the Location Estimates: It is important to
choose an initial estimate of the location that is closer to the
actual estimate so that the likelihood function can be maxi-
mized and converges at a faster rate. In particular, for a large
IoT network with large number of smart devices, this achieves
faster convergence as compared to the random initialization. It
is also possible that a poor choice of initial estimate does not
lead to convergence, and hence incorrect location estimates.
(19) Therefore, in this work, we initialize the gradient ascent with
a weighted centroid localization (WCL) method [34], where
the initial estimate zs is given as

N
Pr
zs =
 z i × N i . (20)
i=1 i=1 Pri
Hence, this initial estimate is used in (14) for better location
estimate and faster convergence.
A. Joint Parameter Estimation for Smart Device Localization
In an unknown IoT environment, it is required to estimate
the PLE and location of the smart device. In the Scenario 1,
we assume that the environmental parameters are known.
Therefore, we use the known shape parameter σr , and PLE
(η) to find the location of smart devices. In Scenario 2, we
first estimate the PLE using the knowledge of a few smart
device locations beforehand. After η is estimated, (14) and (19)
are used to estimate the unknown smart device location using
the adaptive mini-batch gradient ascent method. Finally, in
Scenario 3, we jointly estimate all the unknown parameters,
namely, η, σr , and θ for an unknown IoT environment. The
joint estimation is advantageous as the parameters are learned
on the fly for an unknown IoT environment, thereby making
10670
the method adaptive to the new IoT environment. The local-
ization error and estimation performance are evaluated for all
the three scenarios.
1) Location Estimation With Known PLE: In this case,
the unknown smart device locations are estimated using (14)
and (19) where the PLE is known. We evaluate the
performance of the proposed method for different IoT envi-
ronments with varying PLE.
2) Location Estimation With Unknown PLE: In this case,
using known locations of a few smart devices, the PLE is first
estimated according to:
∂L(Pr )
ηs+1 = ηs + ρ
∂η
where the gradient of the likelihood with respect to PLE is
given as
∂L(Pr )  ln α
N
β η −1
= 1− α2
∂η 2 P0
i=1
After the estimation of PLE, the unknown location of the
smart device is determined using the adaptive gradient ascent
method from (14) and (19). The estimation of PLE and
unknown locations using this method requires the knowledge
of the locations of a few smart devices. To this end, we propose
the adaptive joint estimation method below.
3) Joint Estimation of the Shape Parameter, PLE, and
Location: For an IoT environment with all unknown smart
device locations and PLE, the last scenario is not useful.
Therefore, we utilize (14), (19), (21), and (23) for joint estima-
tion of all the parameters using multivariable gradient ascent
method. For better estimate, we initialize η in the range of
2 to 6 as discussed in [25]. As the dimensions of the indoor
area is available, the location estimates are initialized in the
range of the nearest to farthest locations. The gradient ascent
equations for the parameter σr is given as
∂L(Pr )
σrs+1 = σrs + ρ
∂σr
where
∂L(Pr )  1 β
N
= − 2 .
∂σr σr σr2
i=1
This method is advantageous because for an unknown envi-
ronment, we can estimate all the parameters required for
localization. Also, for a new IoT environment, the parame-
ters can be relearned and locations can be estimated thereby
making the method adaptive in nature.
B. Localization Under Rayleigh Fading
Algorithm 1 explains the steps involved in localizing smart
devices for all three scenarios using the adaptive mini-batch
gradient ascent method. First, a suitable scenario is identified
depending upon prior information. The parameters are esti-
mated using respective equations for the identified scenario.
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IEEE INTERNET OF THINGS JOURNAL, VOL. 8, NO. 13, JULY 1, 2021
Algorithm 1 Algorithm for Smart Device Location Estimation
in a Rayleigh Faded IoT Environment
Input: RSS values at the unknown smart devices location θ
from APs with known locations ψi
Output: Shape parameter (σr ), PLE (η), and smart device
location θ
begin
Estimate the initial location of the smart device using (20)
if Single Sample Gradient Ascent then
use (2) to estimate θ for Scenario 1
else if Scenario 2 and Scenario 3 then
for iteration = 1 to max.iterations do
Compute θ , η, and σr and using (2), (22), and (23),
(21) respectively,
Convergence: if ||ẑi+1 − zˆi || ≤ Threshold then
Break
end
(22) if Adaptive Mini-Batch Gradient Ascent then
Intialize B = 1
for batchsize = 1 to m do
Update B → B × μ, Until μ = 1
end
for iteration = 1 to max.iterations do
Compute θ, η, and σr using Equation (14), Equation
(22), and Equation (23) respectively for Scenario 1,
Scenario 2 and Scenario 3 such that
Convergence: if ||ẑi+1 − zˆi || ≤ Threshold then
Break
end
return Online learned parameters σr , η, and θ
end
C. Computational Complexity of Proposed Localization
We present the computational complexity of the single
(23) sample, mini-batch, and batch gradient ascent methods in
terms of floating-point operations (flops). We assume that the
mathematical operations, such as addition, subtraction, multi-
plication and exponent take one flop count each. Therefore, we
first count the number of flops for the gradient term of (2). The
(24) C term [see (17)] requires a total of 10 flops, and the D term
[see (17)] takes a total of 6 flops. Therefore, the total gradient
term for N APs requires 20N flops. Now the complete term
on the right-hand side of (2) requires a total of 20N + 2 flops
for a single iteration. Furthermore, for mini-batch, the total
number of flops required is (20N + 2)B for a single iteration.
Finally, for batch gradient ascent we need (20N + 2)m flops
in one iteration, where m is the size of a full batch. If we
compare the full batch and mini-batch methods with an exam-
ple of k = 103 samples, mini-batch size of 20 and N = 20
APs, it is observed that a mini-batch requires 8040 flops and
a full batch requires 4.02 × 105 flops for one iteration. Hence,
there is a reduction of 98% flops with mini-batch gradient
ascent method. If the mini-batch size is searched manually, the
timing complexity further increases. Therefore, the proposed
PANDEY et al.: ADAPTIVE MINI-BATCH GRADIENT-ASCENT-BASED LOCALIZATION FOR INDOOR IoT 10671

TABLE II
method adaptively chooses the suitable batch size based on S IMULATION PARAMETERS FOR S MART D EVICE L OCALIZATION
the convergence factor, μ.

D. CRLB for Unknown Smart Device Location

The CRLB computes the lower bound on the variance
of any unbiased estimator, and can be used to evaluate the
performance of the proposed method. Recalling that ψi =
[pi , qi ]T , where ψi ∈ R2 and i = 1, 2, . . . , N are known loca-
tions of N APs, the CRLB for unknown smart device location
parameter θ = [x, y]T is derived as follows. and the second derivative is given as
Proposition 2: The CRLB for location estimate in a

∂ 2 ln L(Pr ) 
N
Rayleigh fading environment is given as 1 2(y − qi )2 β
= η − −
    ∂y2 α α2 P0
i=1
CRLB(θ )  I−1 (θ ) 1,1 + I−1 (θ ) 2,2 (25)
[α η/2−1 + (η − 2)(y − qi )2 α η/2−2 ]. (32)
where I−1 (θ) is the inverse of I(θ ), the Fisher information
Finally
matrix (FIM), whose elements are given as


∂ 2 ln L(Pri ) 
N
N

 2(y − qi )
2(x − pi )2 (η − 2)(x − pi )2 = η(x − pi )
E(Fxx ) = i 1 − − γ 1 + ∂x∂y α2
θ − ψi 2 (θ − ψi )2 i=1
i=1
β  η

N

 − β 2 −2 (η − 2)(y − qi ) (33)
2(y − qi )2 (η − 2)(y − qi )2 P0
E(Fyy ) = i 1 − − γ 1 +
θ − ψi 2 (θ − ψi )2
i=1 which is simplified to
N
  
2 (η − 2)γ ∂ 2 ln L(Pri ) 
N
β
E(Fxy ) = η(x − pi )(y − qi ) − =
2
η(x − pi )(y − qi ) 2 −
η
(η − 2)α 2 −2 .
θ − ψi )4 (θ − ψi )4 ∂x∂y α P0
i=1
i=1
(26) (34)
where i = (η/θ − ψi 2 ), γ = exp{(4.342 σg2 /2)} and E(.) Now, from (1), χ = Pri −P0 −10η log10 θ − ψi  which fol-
denotes the expectation operator. lows Gaussian distribution. Therefore, the moment generating
Proof: From the definition of CRLB [35]
function of Gaussian pdf is given as E(etx ) = eμt+(σg t /2) .
2 2
  !
vr θ̂j ≥ I−1 (θ) (27) Hence, the expression for our model is E[eχ /4.34 ] =
jj exp{(4.342 σg2 /2)} = γ (say). Using the identity, we compute
where vr (.) denotes the variance operator and I(θ ) is the FIM the Expectation of the above derivatives and the FIM elements
given as are obtained as in (26). Finally, the CRLB is derived with the
⎡ ! !⎤ help of (25).
∂ 2 ln p(.)
E ∂ ∂x∂y
2 ln p(.)
E We compare the performance of the proposed method
⎢ ∂x2
 ⎥
I(θ) = −⎣ ∂ 2 ln p(.) ! ∂ 2 ln p(.) ⎦ by comparing the obtained root mean square error
E ∂x∂y E ∂σ 2
y (RMSE) with the CRLB obtained in (25). The localiza-
   tion results obtained using the adaptive mini-batch method
E(F )
 xx  E F
 xy  (say).
= (28) for all the three scenarios are discussed in the next
E Fxy E Fyy
section.
The first-order and second-order derivatives of the log-
likelihood function with respect to the location coordinates V. P ERFORMANCE E VALUATION BY S IMULATION S TUDY
are, respectively, given as
In this section, we simulate a real-time indoor IoT envi-
∂ ln L(Pr )  (x − pi ) ηβ  
N
η ronment with Rayleigh fading and lognormal shadowing to
= η − (x − pi )α 2 −1 . (29) evaluate the performance of the proposed method for the
∂x α P0
i=1
three scenarios, as discussed in Section IV-A. The localization
Therefore, the second derivative is given as results for the combined lognormal and Rayleigh fading mod-

 els are compared with the three robust state-of-the-art methods
∂ 2 ln L(Pr ) 
N
1 2(x − pi )2 β
= η − − that also estimate PLE and location using path-loss models. We
∂x2 α α2 P0 also present the advantages of the adaptive mini-batch method
i=1
[α η/2−1 + (η − 2)(x − pi )2 α η/2−2 ] (30) over fixed mini-batch and full batch methods for the simulation
environment.
Similarly The parameters used for simulating the Rayleigh fading and
lognormal shadowing are shown in Table II.
∂ ln L(Pr )  (y − qi ) ηβ  
N
η
= η − (y − qi )α 2 −1 (31) We simulate the Rayleigh faded environment with the help
∂y α P0 of standard path loss (1) and standard fading parameters, η and
i=1

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10672
Fig. 3. (a) Variation of received power with distance for Rayleigh fading
and lognormal shadowing for given simulation parameters. (b) Variation of
localization error for different values of η and σg .
σr mentioned in [25] and [27]. We consider an indoor room of
area 20 × 20 m2 with 20 smart device locations at a particular
time. We consider a small area with different values of η, as
the fading affects are prominent in small indoor spaces, in-line
with the works that estimate PLE and location [6], [8], [19].
A. Localization Results for Simulation Environment
In this section, we present the smart device localization
results using the proposed method for the simulation envi-
ronment. The performance metric for the localization method
is the average localization error, defined as
1 " "
S
" "
LE = "θ̂ t − θ t "
S
t=1
where θ̂ t and θ t are the estimated and actual location of the
tth smart device, respectively. We consider a total of S smart
devices in the IoT network.
The smart device location is estimated using the proposed
method for an environment with both Rayleigh fading and log-
normal shadowing. We use 1000 Monte Carlo runs and report
the estimated parameters with 95 % confidence interval (CI).
Fig. 3(a) shows the received power for the cases consider-
ing Rayleigh, lognormal, and no shadowing, respectively. The
value of σr is 0.85 and for Rayleigh fading and lognormal
shadowing, the value of σg2 is considered as 6 dB.
Scenario 1: We vary the shadowing effect (σg2 ) and PLE to
analyze the effect of the localization error. Fig. 3(b) shows the
variation of the localization error for different values of PLE
and lognormal shadowing parameter σg2 . It is observed that
for lower shadowing effects, the localization error is smaller
as compared to a higher σg2 . As the noise degrades the esti-
mated parameters, it is observed that the localization error
marginally increases with the increase in noise. The proposed
method provides lower localization error for the indoor envi-
ronment (η = 3 to 6); hence the method is suitable for indoor
environments as the PLE lies in the indoor environment range.
Scenario 2: Assuming the locations of a few smart devices
are known, to find the location of the smart devices using
the proposed method, we first initialize the location estimates
using (20). Table III shows the simulation results for the PLE
and smart device localization error estimate. The average of
1000 Monte Carlo runs is reported in Table III along with the
95 % CI. We observe that the estimate of PLE is closer to the
actual estimate for lower values of η. The maximum average
localization error is 2.28 m using the proposed method in this
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IEEE INTERNET OF THINGS JOURNAL, VOL. 8, NO. 13, JULY 1, 2021
TABLE III
E STIMATION OF PLE AND S MART D EVICE L OCATION W HEN L OCATIONS
OF A F EW S MART D EVICE A RE K NOWN
Fig. 4. (a) Comparison of cumulative distributed function (CDF) of localiza-
tion error for lognormal and Rayleigh fading. (b) Comparison of localization
error assuming lognormal shadowing [4], [31], and combined shadowing +
fading. (c) Comparison of tracking with the proposed combined model and
only lognormal shadowing in a 20×20 simulated environment. x and y coordi-
nates represent the smart device locations in the given simulation environment.
S = Only shadowing, and S + F = Combined shadowing and fading.
TABLE IV
E STIMATION OF PLE AND S MART D EVICE L OCATION
FOR AN U NKNOWN E NVIRONMENT
(35)
scenario, is for the simulation environment with η = 5. As
the PLE is increased for a new environment, the estimation
error also marginally increases. This is due to the fact that the
higher value of PLE indicates more obstructions, and hence
a higher number of NLOS paths, thereby degrading the loca-
tion estimate. However, the variation in localization error is
marginal, which shows the robustness of the proposed method
to higher PLE environments.
Scenario 3: We jointly estimate the PLE and smart device
location without prior knowledge of any environment parame-
ters. This is the most generic and robust scenario, as we do not
put any constraint on the parameters such as PLE. In this sce-
nario also, to estimate η, we run 1000 Monte Carlo simulations
and report the 95 % CI. We initialize the PLE randomly in the
range of 2 to 5. Also, as the area of the simulated Indoor IoT
network is known, the initial location estimate is randomly
chosen in the range of 0–20 m. Table IV shows the joint
estimate of PLE and localization error for the simulated RSS
values. The average localization error for the simulation envi-
ronment with all considered value of η is 1.58 m. Therefore,
the proposed method provides comparable average localiza-
tion error for all three cases. It is to be noted here that the
computed localization errors for all these cases are obtained
for random placement of APs multiple times. It is possible
that few smart device locations receive high RSS, and there-
fore, provide lower localization error. However, at few smart
PANDEY et al.: ADAPTIVE MINI-BATCH GRADIENT-ASCENT-BASED LOCALIZATION FOR INDOOR IoT
Fig. 5. (a) Impact of epochs on localization error for different methods
on simulation data set. (b) Variation of mini-batch size with epochs for
convergence.
Fig. 6. (a) Impact of epochs on PLE for different methods on simulation
data. (b) Number of epochs required for different gradient ascent methods for
convergence of PLE.
device locations, the RSS values decrease, and the values are
low leading to lower localization error. The reason for this
is based on the term β in (2). If the value of β vanishes or
becomes very small because of low RSS values, the location
estimate is inaccurate, leading to high localization error. We
report the average localization error for all the three cases.
Observe that the localization error remains comparable for
all the three scenarios; hence, the proposed method is suitable
for an indoor fading environment where the parameters can
be known or unknown apriori. However, this small variation
in the location estimate is observed for the three scenarios
because, in the first two scenarios, we put a constraint on the
parameters that limit the search region for the maximum value
of the log-likelihood function.
1) Comparison of Smart Device Localization on Lognormal
Shadowing and Rayleigh Fading: As discussed in Section II
that most of the existing methods assume only a lognormal
shadowing for localization. Fig. 4 compares the localization
results when only shadowing, and combined shadowing and
fading are considered. In particular, Fig. 4(a) compares the
CDF of the localization error for both the models. It is
observed that with the proposed method, the smart devices
are localized within 1.34 m localization error, whereas the
maximum localization error is 2.4 m when only lognormal
shadowing is considered. The increase in localization error is
observed because only lognormal shadowing is not sufficient
to model the RSS values in an indoor NLOS IoT environ-
ment. Now considering the fading effect, the localization error
decreases as the RSS values are appropriately modeled, includ-
ing both the shadowing and fading effects. Fig. 4(b) compares
the average localization error for both lognormal shadowing
as well as combined shadowing and Rayleigh fading. It is
observed that there is a 50% reduction in the average local-
ization error when the Rayleigh fading is considered combined
with shadowing. Finally, Fig. 4(c) shows the comparison using
a tracking plot with the actual locations of smart devices
and estimated locations. It is observed that the combined
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10673
Fig. 7. (a) Experimental indoor IoT environment for Wi-Fi RSS (dBm) data
collection. (b) Variation of Wi-Fi RSS at different locations.
track is much closer to the actual track. Hence, the proposed
method considering Rayleigh fading is better for an indoor
IoT environment as compared to only the shadowing model.
2) Comparison of Convergence Results: In this section, we
present the effectiveness of the different adaptive mini-batch
method. Fig. 5 shows the convergence of variants of gradi-
ent ascent method and the selection of mini-batch size for
the proposed method. Fig. 5(a) demonstrates that the adaptive
mini-batch method converges earlier to the fixed mini-batch
method. The full batch method does not converge even after
15000 epochs. Fig. 5(b) shows the variation of batch size with
the convergence factor (μ) and the number of epochs. We
observe that when the batch size is 1, the convergence factor
μ < 1; therefore, the batch size is adaptively increased so that
μ attains unity. As μ is close to unity, to attain sharper maxi-
mum, the batch size is further increased utilizing more epochs.
It is observed that μ is closer to unity within 270 epochs.
However, μ attains unity and is stable around 845 epochs with
a batch size of 30. Therefore, it utilizes the advantage of sin-
gle sample method (reaches closer to unity quickly in 270
epochs), that is, faster convergence, and also the advantage of
the full batch method, that is, higher accuracy (achieved by
further requiring 845 epochs to converge).
Fig. 6(a) shows the convergence of PLE for different vari-
ants of gradient ascent methods. It is observed that the
proposed adaptive mini-batch method converges earlier than
the fixed mini-batch method. Also, the accuracy of the adaptive
and fixed mini-batch methods is more than the single sample
method, as it is closer to the actual estimate of η = 2. Fig. 6(b)
highlights the number of epochs required for each gradient
ascent method to converge. It is observed that even after 10 000
epochs, the full batch method is not converged. Thus, we con-
clude that the proposed adaptive mini-batch method is best
suited for an indoor IoT environment as compared to other
gradient ascent methods.
VI. P ERFORMANCE E VALUATION IN R EAL I OT T ESTBED
The localization performance of the proposed method is
tested on an indoor IoT environment consisting of multiple
obstacles, such as walls and furniture contributing to shad-
owing and fading. As the simulation environment may not
exactly mimic the real-time indoor scenarios; hence, we test
the proposed method on a real-IoT testbed. We consider an
area of 600 m2 consisting of 26 locations where the smart
devices are placed. The Wi-Fi RSS values are observed from
26 smart devices, as shown in Fig. 7(a). For this testbed, we
10674
Fig. 8. (a) Variation of localization error for different gradient ascent methods
on experimental data set. (b) Convergence of localization error with epochs
for experimental data set.
Fig. 9. (a) Convergence of PLE for different gradient ascent methods.
(b) Number of epochs required for convergence.
estimate the parameters and locations of the smart devices, as
discussed in Section II. The data set contains 180 RSS sam-
ples at each location. Fig. 7(b) shows the variation of Wi-Fi
RSS at different locations. It is observed that because of the
fading, the RSS values fluctuate and vary at the same location
as well as at different locations.
A. Localization Results for Real IoT Testbed
This section presents localization results on the experimen-
tal testbed. As the environment parameters are not known,
only Scenarios 2 and 3 are valid for this experimental testbed.
For Scenario 2, the estimated average PLE is 5.12, with a
95 % CI of [5.08, 5.16]. This estimate is in agreement with
the theoretical estimates of PLE presented in [25] as η = 5
indicates an indoor environment and the RSS data is actually
collected in a dense indoor environment. The estimated σr is
0.26 with 95 % CI of [0.23, 0.29], and the localization error is
4.75 m with a CI of [4.72, 4.78] using the adaptive mini-batch
gradient ascent method. Similarly, for Scenario 3, the joint
average estimate of PLE and localization error is estimated as
4.36 and 4.75 m, respectively. Thus, the localization error and
PLE estimates are comparable to Scenario 2, where the loca-
tion information of a few smart devices was known. Fig. 8(a)
represents the localization error for different type of gradi-
ent ascent methods on the experimental data set. We observe
that in the real-IoT scenario, the localization error is more
as compared to the simulation environment as the simulation
environment can not mimic all the changes occurring in a real
environment. This shows the necessity of testing the proposed
method on real-time IoT testbeds. However, many existing
path-loss-based localization methods [5], [8], [17] only report
localization error in a simulation environment.
The proposed adaptive mini-batch gradient ascent method
for the joint estimation of all the unknown parameters yields
a good location estimate as observed from the CI in Tables III
and IV on simulation environment as well as real-time IoT
testbed. The results are also at par with the cases where few
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IEEE INTERNET OF THINGS JOURNAL, VOL. 8, NO. 13, JULY 1, 2021
Fig. 10. (a) Variation of mini-batch size with epochs for convergence.
(b) Convergence of different initialization methods.
parameters are known or fixed. In the following, we analyze
the convergence of different gradient ascent methods for the
experimental testbed.
1) Convergence Analysis: Fig. 8(b) shows the convergence
of full batch, fixed mini-batch, adaptive mini-batch, and single
sample gradient ascent methods. The results are in agreement
with the theory discussed in Section II as all the methods
converge to the localization error value of approximately 4.78
m. The single sample method converges fastest while the full
batch method takes maximum epochs to converge, and the
performance of the fixed mini-batch gradient ascent lies in
between the other two methods. Finally, the proposed adap-
tive mini-batch method is observed to converge with fewer
epochs than the fixed mini-batch method, for which we need
to choose an arbitrary batch size. A similar convergence trend
is observed for the PLE estimate, as shown in Fig. 9(a).
The proposed adaptive mini-batch method converges faster
than fixed mini-batch method. Fig. 9(b) shows the number
of epochs required for each method to converge for the exper-
imental IoT testbed. It is evident that the proposed adaptive
mini-batch method requires fewer epochs than the fixed-batch
method to converge for both simulation environment and
experimental testbed.
Quick location updates are required for any connected IoT
environment; hence, early convergence of the adaptive method
leading to faster parameter updates is useful. As shown in
Fig. 10(a), the convergence factor μ becomes unity after the
batch size of 55 and does not fluctuate. It can be observed that
with the initial batch size of 1, the value of μ < 1. Therefore,
the batch size is increased, and within 800 epochs, μ reaches
closer to unity. Now to achieve a sharper maximum, more
epochs are utilized, and it is observed that around 2200 epochs,
μ attains unity. Therefore, the proposed adaptive method uti-
lizes the advantage of both the single sample and full batch
methods.
For early convergence, the proper initialization of the gra-
dient ascent method is important. The effect of appropriate
initialization is analyzed in Fig. 10(b). To analyze the effect
of initialization, we find the number of iterations required for
maximizing the log-likelihood function with a close estimate
(closer to the actual location coordinates) and a far estimate
(farther from the actual location coordinates), respectively. It
is observed that the WCL method converges at a compara-
ble number of iterations with the close estimate initialization.
However, other initialization methods take more iterations to
converge as compared to the WCL method. It is observed that
all the initialization methods converge and maximize the log-
likelihood function. Therefore, in the proposed method, we
PANDEY et al.: ADAPTIVE MINI-BATCH GRADIENT-ASCENT-BASED LOCALIZATION FOR INDOOR IoT
Fig. 11. Variation of CRLB and RMSE with smart devices.
TABLE V
C OMPARISON OF L OCALIZATION E RROR AND F LOP C OUNT OF
S TATE - OF - THE -A RT M ETHODS FOR B OTH S IMULATED
AND R EAL I OT E NVIRONMENT
choose the WCL method for initializing the location estimate
for Scenario 1 and Scenario 2, respectively.
2) CRLB Analysis: The CRLB of the proposed method is
obtained from (25). Fig. 11 shows that the CRLB and the
RMSE decrease with the number of smart devices. As the
number of smart devices increase, the RMSE is closer to
CRLB, thereby demonstrating the efficacy of our proposed
estimation method.
B. Comparison With State-of-the-Art Methods
Table V compares the proposed method with four robust
state-of-the-art RSS-based localization methods that also uti-
lize path-loss models and address the fading. These methods
are frequently used for localization using Wi-Fi RSS val-
ues due to their ease of implementation [1]. Specifically, we
choose WCL [36], particle filter (PF) [10], linear least square
(LLS) [24], and VariLoc [5] methods to compare with our
proposed method.
The WCL method [36] provides an unbiased location
estimate and is extensively used for fast localization. This
method is deployed for a Rayleigh fading environment, and
exhibits increased localization accuracy with the increase in
the transmission power of the APs. However, the WCL method
provides a high localization error of 7.5 m for our experimen-
tal data set as compared to the proposed method that provides
a localization error of 4.6 m. Shen et al. [10] also utilizes the
Rayleigh fading model and particle filtering approach. A high
localization error of 6.9 m on real IoT testbed and 4.61 m
on simulation testbed is reported with medium complexity in
terms of flop counts. The LLS-based localization is another
classic method that does not require apriori information of
noise distribution [37]. This low-complexity method can be
utilized for most of the signal measurement techniques. It is
observed that for our experimental data set, the LLS method
provides a localization error of 5.5 m, and 6.36 m, respec-
tively, for the simulation testbed. We report that Variloc [5]
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10675
provides the minimum localization error on the experimental
data set and a localization error of 2.15 m on the simulation
testbed. This method filters out the deep faded signals and then
utilizes the centroid localization with the grid scan, which is
highly computation intensive. As VariLoc work provides the
best localization performance on the experimental data set,
we also compute the number of flops required to achieve this
localization error.
The number of flops required for VariLoc is KN +
6MN + 7NA + 80(1 + 7NA) + 7NA + 2(|| + 1) =
N(K + 6M + 574A) + 82 + 2|| where K denotes the trans-
mission power levels, M denotes number of samples per
transmission level, N is the number of APs, A is the num-
ber of grid points in the localization area, and || denotes
the number of grid points in the final set. Consider N = 20,
K = 10, A = 2400, || = 25. The total number of flop counts
obtained is 3 × 107 . However, for the same set of param-
eters the flop counts obtained for our proposed method is
8 × 105 . Therefore, it is observed that at convergence, VariLoc
method requires 100 times more flop counts than our proposed
method. The real experimental data set is not entirely Rayleigh
faded unlike the simulation environment, where we consid-
ered a perfect Rayleigh fading. Hence, the performance of
our method is second best in the real environment, but best in
the case of a simulation environment where VariLoc provides
a high localization error. Given that the performance of our
proposed method is comparable to the Variloc method with
lesser computational complexity in terms of the number of
flop counts, we conclude that the proposed method provides
comparable localization error with the state-of-the-art local-
ization methods utilizing path-loss models and addressing the
fading effects. Additionally, the proposed method converges
faster in a Rayleigh fading environment.
VII. C ONCLUSION
This article presented the localization of smart devices in an
indoor IoT environment. The proposed Rayleigh fading-based
localization method includes the fading effects, which are
mostly ignored in other existing path-loss-based localization
methods. We derive the maximum likelihood estimate for a
combined shadowing and Rayleigh faded environment, which
is nonlinear, and estimate the model parameters using an adap-
tive mini-batch gradient ascent method. The proposed method
adaptively selects the batch size, and addresses the challenge
of arbitrary selection of fixed mini-batch size, thereby taking
the advantages of both full batch and single sample gradient
ascent algorithms. Therefore, the proposed method is fast and
accurate, and hence suitable for the IoT network. Furthermore,
a joint estimation of the model parameters is proposed that
estimates the parameters adaptively with high accuracy in a
real-time indoor IoT scenario. The CRLB of the proposed
estimator is also derived. Our results for both simulation and
real environment, show a considerable improvement over the
methods that assume only the shadowing model with lesser
computational complexity. The future work includes consider-
ing the mobility of smart devices for outdoor localization in
the presence of generalized fading models.
10676
Fig. 12. (a) Values of first-order principal minor for all locations. (b) Values
of second order principal minor. (c) Log-likelihood values for the smart device
at (0, 0).
A PPENDIX
A. Concavity of the Log-Likelihood Function
The global maximum should be attained using the gradient
ascent method, and the function should not be stuck at a local
maximum. The function attains a unique global maximum if
it is concave, differentiable, and Lipschitz continuous [38].
Here, we prove the concavity of the log-likelihood function
obtained in (11). For strong concavity, the function should
be twice differentiable, and its Hessian should be negative
definite. The Hessian matrix is given as
⎡ 2 ⎤ neous sensor positions,” IEEE Trans. Signal Process., vol. 57, no. 12,
∂ ln L(Pr ) ∂ ln L(Pri )
2
∂x∂y
H=⎣ ∂x2
∂ 2 ln L(Pri ) ∂ 2 ln L(Pr )
⎦.
∂y∂x ∂y2
The matrix H is negative definite if the first-order principal
minor satisfies ([∂ 2 ln L(Pr )]/∂x2 ) < 0, and the second order
principal minor satisfies
# #
# ∂ 2 ln L(Pr ) ∂ 2 ln L(Pri ) #
# ∂x2 # [17] R. W. Ouyang, A. K.-S. Wong, and C.-T. Lea, “Received sig-
D2 = ## ∂ 2 ln L(P ) 2 ∂x∂y ## > 0.
∂ ln L(Pr )
# ∂y∂x ri
∂y2
# Noncooperative and cooperative schemes,” IEEE Trans. Veh. Technol.,
We compute the first-order principal minor (D1 ) for the
given indoor scenario. Fig. 12(a) shows D1 < 0 ∀ θ . Similarly,
D2 is computed as shown in Fig. 12(b) that exhibits D2 > 0 ∀
θ . Hence, H is negative definite. It is observed that the second
order derivative is finite ∀ θ, implying the function is differ-
entiable. As discussed in [39], a concave function is locally
Lipschitz continuous. Therefore, all the conditions for the log-
likelihood function’s concavity are satisfied, and the function
attains the global maximum. It is also verified from Fig.12(c)
that for a particular location (0, 0) of the smart device, the log-
likelihood attains maximum around the same location. Hence,
the maximum is achieved at the estimated smart device loca-
tion and function is not stuck at local maximum as it is concave
and evident from Fig. 12(c). A similar nature of the log-
likelihood function is also obtained for other locations of the
smart device.
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Ankur Pandey (Graduate Student Member, IEEE)
received the M.Tech. degree in communication
systems engineering from the Indian Institute of
Technology Patna, Patna, India, in 2018, where he
is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree with the
Department of Electrical Engineering.
His research interest includes signal processing
for IoT networks addressing the smart device local-
ization challenges.
Mr. Pandey is a recipient of the National Award
from L&T—ISTE for the Best M.Tech. Thesis (2nd
Prize), the Best M.Tech. Thesis Award from the institute, and the Institute
Silver Medal for scoring highest CPI in the course.
Piyush Tiwary was born in Bihar, India, in January
2000. He is currently pursuing the B.Tech. degree
in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of
Technology Patna, Patna, India.
His research interests lie in the area of deep
learning and statistical machine learning. His cur-
rent interest is focused on the generalization of deep
learning methods across domains.
Authorized licensed use limited to: Indian Institute of Technology Patna. Downloaded on July 29,2021 at 14:46:37 UTC from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.
10677
Sudhir Kumar (Senior Member, IEEE) received the
Ph.D. degree from the Electrical Engineering (EE)
Department, Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur,
Kanpur, India, in 2015.
He is currently an Assistant Professor with the EE
Department, Indian Institute of Technology Patna,
Patna, India. He has worked as an Erasmus Mundus
Fellow with the Department of Computer Science,
University of Oxford, Oxford, U.K. He has pub-
lished more than 45 research articles in prestigious
journals and conference proceedings. His broad
research interests include wireless sensor networks and Internet of Things.
Dr. Kumar is a recipient of several awards and fellowships, such as the
Best Teacher Award in UG Teaching from the EE Department, the CSIR and
SERB International Travel Grants, the National Award from L&T—ISTE for
having guided the Best M.Tech. Thesis (Second Prize), the SERB Indo-U.S.
Postdoctoral Fellowship, the India-EU Namaste Fellowship, the TCS Research
Scholarship, and the MHRD Scholarship.
Sajal K. Das (Fellow, IEEE) received the Ph.D.
degree in computer science from the University of
Central Florida in 1988. He is currently a pro-
fessor of Computer Science and the Daniel St.
Clair Endowed Chair at the Missouri University of
Science and Technology, Rolla, USA. His current
research interests include wireless sensor networks,
mobile and pervasive computing, cyber-physical
systems and IoT, smart environments (smart city,
smart grid, and smart health), edge and cloud com-
puting, and cyber security. He has published exten-
sively in these areas and coauthored four books, including the Principles
of Cyber-Physical Systems: An Interdisciplinary Approach (Cambridge
University Press, 2020).
Prof. Das is the Editor-in-Chief of Pervasive and Mobile Computing, and
an Associate Editor of several journals including IEEE T RANSACTIONS ON
D EPENDABLE AND S ECURE C OMPUTING and IEEE T RANSACTIONS ON
M OBILE C OMPUTING.