In a device-free human detection and tracking system using a received signal strength indicator (RSSI), the change in the RSSI pattern is monitored and analyzed to detect and track the human movement. The variation in measured RSSI signals is one of the major effects leading to significant detection and tracking error. To handle such a research problem, in this paper, we propose adaptive RSSI filtering methods designed by considering both the detection and tracking accuracy and the computational complexity. The novelty of our proposed filtering methods is that, to reduce the computational complexity, the measured RSSI input values are automatically filtered only when they have high variation levels; an appropriate threshold is set and used for the decision. Additionally, to increase the detection and tracking accuracy, the measured RSSI input values with different variation levels are filtered with different filtering levels adaptively. The proposed filtering methods are verified by the experiments, which have been carried out in an indoor environment. Various human movement patterns with different directions and speeds are tested. The experimental results show that, with our test scenarios, the proposed filtering methods can appropriately reduce the RSSI variation. They provide good detection and tracking accuracy, which is measured by the number of times the system can detect and track the human with the correct zone. The computational complexity measured by the number of mathematical operations, used by the proposed methods, is lower than comparative filtering methods.

In this paper, we demonstrate the realistic test of a 2.4 GHz multi-hop wireless network for mountainous forest and watercourse environments. A multi-hop network using IEEE 802.15.4 XBee3 micro-modules and a communication protocol among nodes were developed. A wireless node deployment solution was introduced for practical testing. The proposed system’s communication reliability was tested in two different scenarios: a mountainous forest with sloping areas and trees and a watercourse, which referred to environmental and flooding monitoring applications. Wireless network performances were evaluated through the received signal strength indicator (RSSI) level of each wireless link, a packet delivery ratio (PDR), as the successful rate of packet transmission, and the end-to-end delay (ETED) of all data packets from the transmitter to the receiver. The experimental results demonstrate the success of the multi-hop WSN deployment and communication in both scenarios, where the RSSI of each link was kept at the accepted level and the PDR achieved the highest result. Furthermore, as a real-time response, the data from the source could be sent to the sink with a small ETED.