  The use of wireless signals for purposes of localization enables a host of
applications relating to the determination and verification of the positions of
network participants, ranging from radar to satellite navigation. Consequently,
it has been a longstanding interest of theoretical and practical research in
mobile networks and many solutions have been proposed in the scientific
literature. However, it is hard to assess the performance of these in the real
world and, more severely, to compare their advantages and disadvantages in a
controlled scientific manner.
  With this work, we attempt to improve the current state of the art in
localization research and put it on a solid scientific grounding for the
future. Concretely, we develop LocaRDS, an open reference dataset of real-world
crowdsourced flight data featuring more than 222 million measurements from over
50 million transmissions recorded by 323 sensors. We show how LocaRDS can be
used to test, analyze and directly compare different localization techniques
and further demonstrate its effectiveness by examining the open question of the
aircraft localization problem in crowdsourced sensor networks. Finally, we
provide a working reference implementation for the aircraft localization
problem and a discussion of possible metrics for use with LocaRDS.
