A Kriging algorithm for location fingerprinting based on received signal strength

With growing technology, Location Based Services (LBSs) are becoming a vital part of life. The rapid development of mobile internet has offered an opportunity for Wi-Fi indoor positioning to come under the spotlight due to its low cost. Here, indoor positioning is performed using Wi-Fi. The earlier solutions like GPS does not provide efficient positioning in indoor environment due to weak signal reception which makes Wi-Fi more reliable. However, nowadays the accuracy of the traditional indoor positioning algorithms like trilateration cannot meet the practical requirement. This paper proposes the performance analysis of indoor positioning algorithms using Wi-Fi technology based on Received Signal Strength (RSS) from the access points in the network. The positioning algorithms are based on location fingerprinting consisting of two stages: The offline database creation and the online positioning. The RSS values obtained by the mobile device at reference points are sent to the server where all the location fingerprints of all reference points are stored in a database. Coordinates of user position are calculated using positioning algorithms and the position is displayed in terms of 2Dcoordinates of the room and indoor map. Basic Fingerprint algorithm, RSS Fingerprint with minimum Euclidean Distance algorithm and RSS Fingerprint with Euclidean Distance and k-nearest neighbors' algorithm were implemented. Moreover comparison of their performance was carried out in terms of accuracy of position. From the result, it is found that an average accuracy of 0.4962 meters was achieved by RSS Fingerprint with minimum Euclidean distance algorithm.

In location fingerprinting based indoor positioning system, received signal strength (RSS) indications from a set of Wi-Fi access points are used as a unique fingerprint to identify a specific location. However these RSS fingerprints may become outdated when there are unanticipated environmental changes. Re-measuring RSS fingerprints for all locations to maintain an up-to-date RSS database incurs high operational cost, which is impractical in dynamically changed environment. In this paper, we propose a method to estimate the RSS fingerprint of a specific location from a set of neighboring re-measured RSS fingerprints, called “feedbacks”. The proposed method searches for new feedbacks and some necessary old RSS fingerprints in the cut-off area and then applies plane-interpolation to calculate the new RSS fingerprint for a specific location. Based on simulation results, about 5% of re-measured RSS feedbacks are required to satisfy 80% of positioning correctness in the simulated 30×30 m <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> area.

In this paper, we propose a surface correlation based fingerprinting method in sparse Wi-Fi environment. The proposed method can estimate location even with very few Wi-Fi APs by using accumulated spatial RSS pattern. We verify performance of the proposed method through several tests in a building with complex paths. Many studies have developed localization technologies that use measurements such as RSS (Received Signal Strength) or RTT (Round Trip Time) for Wi-Fi signal. All RF have signal noise and distortion problems as well as multipath problem in indoor environments. As the distance from the RF signal source increases, the discrimination of the RSS decreases due to RF signal noise and distortion. Therefore, ambiguity of RSS increases as the distance increases, the performance deteriorates. The conventional RF based localization method have tried to maintain dense RF environment to guarantee stable and accurate performance. However, in order to maintain the dense RF environment, it is becoming a barrier to commercialization of localization technology due to high cost of constructing RF infrastructure and maintenance difficulty. In this paper, we propose a Surface Correlation (SC) based fingerprinting technique to maintain high positioning performance even with few Wi-Fi APs. The surface is the accumulated RSS pattern data during the movement of a pedestrian, which means the spatial RSS pattern. Conventional fingerprinting methods using kNN (k-Nearest Neighbors) and WkNN (Weighted kNN) are very vulnerable to signal noise and distortion because they utilize instantaneous RSS data. The performance of Particle Filter (PF) based localization technology is also degraded in areas where Wi-Fi AP is sparsely distributed. However, the proposed method is very robust against signal noise and distortion because it compares the spatial RSS pattern with the reference RSS pattern on the fingerprinting database. This increases localization accuracy and availability for Wi-Fi coverage. For localization, the proposed method conduct correlation process for the spatial RSS pattern of a pedestrian with reference RSS pattern of database. So, the reference RSS pattern should be extracted from a reference trajectory that matches a pedestrian`s walking path. The proposed method utilize a database of ‘link-node’ structure to dynamically generate a reference trajectory in indoor environment with complicated path. It generate candidate reference trajectories using only MAC address and turn event of Pedestrian Dead-Reckoning (PDR). The proposed method fix a reference trajectory between these candidate trajectories through correlation process of measured RSS pattern with each reference RSS pattern. A reference point on the fixed reference having most similar RSS pattern to a pedestrian`s is considered as a current location. In order to improve performance at a fork where RSS ambiguity increases, the proposed method estimates preferentially for a reference trajectory matching with PDR turn event. The turn event can be wrong due to various motion of a pedestrian. The proposed method selects a correct reference trajectory by continuously performing correlation process on candidate reference trajectories. In order to verify the performance of the proposed surface correlation based fingerprinting method, we conducted several tests in a three-story building. Before the tests, we conducted a survey of Wi-Fi environment to construct fingerprinting database in the building. As a result of the survey, 170 APs are distributed in the building. We reduced the number of APs by 20% from 170 to 17, and analyzed performance of the proposed and conventional localization methods. The test results show that the performance of the conventional localization methods degrade as the number of applied APs decreases. The proposed fingerprinting method shows a 3 meter localization error even with very few Wi-Fi APs, and unlike the conventional fingerprinting method, the localization error is bounded to be within 5m due to the use of spatial RSS pattern. In this paper, we presented the fingerprinting method using the surface correlation in sparse Wi-Fi environment. The proposed fingerprinting method accumulates Wi-Fi RSS during movement of a pedestrian. The proposed method compares the spatial RSS pattern, which is accumulated RSS data, with reference RSS patterns of fingerprinting database. By comparing the RSS patterns, the proposed method greatly improves accuracy as well as stability. In addition, it can be effectively applied in a sparse Wi-Fi environment by improving the availability of ambiguous areas of Wi-Fi coverage. Through these results, we expect to be able to provide accurate and reliable location information even in indoor weak RF environment.

The development of the Internet of Things has accelerated research in the indoor location fingerprinting technique, which provides value-added localization services for existing WLAN infrastructures without the need for any specialized hardware. The deployment of a fingerprinting based localization system requires an extremely large amount of measurements on received signal strength information to generate a location fingerprint database. Nonetheless, this requirement can rarely be satisfied in most indoor environments. In this paper, we target one but common situation when the collected measurements on received signal strength information are insufficient, and show limitations of existing location fingerprinting methods in dealing with inadequate location fingerprints. We also introduce a novel method to reduce noise in measuring the received signal strength based on the maximum likelihood estimation, and compute locations from inadequate location fingerprints by using the stochastic gradient descent algorithm. Our experiment results show that our proposed method can achieve better localization performance even when only a small quantity of RSS measurements is available. Especially when the number of observations at each location is small, our proposed method has evident superiority in localization accuracy.

Fingerprint localization (FL) is an effective localization method in rich scattering environments. However, conventional FL solutions are based on received signal strength (RSS) information, and they usually suffer from considerable performance degradation due to complex environmental dynamics. Therefore, hybrid FL methods were recently proposed to improve the accuracy performance by fully exploiting the features of different fingerprints. At the same time, since reference points (RPs) in most FL methods are distributed with lattice pattern, the establishment of fingerprint database requires huge amount of offline training, and thus different techniques were used to reduce the offline training cost for FL methods. Inspired by the above work, this paper presents an improved hybrid FL method, in which the RSS and direction of arrival (DOA) are collected as fingerprints. Moreover, instead of the lattice RPs layout (LRL) used in most existing hybrid FL methods, a circular RPs layout (CRL) is introduced into the proposed hybrid FL scheme to reduce the overhead of offline training. Simulation results show that when the signal-to-noise ratio of the system is 15 dB, the averaged localization error of the proposed RSS-DOA-CRL algorithm is reduced by 80.0% compared to the RSS-based FL, and 33.5% compared to the hybrid RSS-DOA with LRL respectively.

In this work, we investigate the location error of a fingerprint-based indoor system with the application of hybrid received signal strength (RSS) and channel state information (CSI) fingerprints. It manifests that exploiting correlation between RSS and CSI could effectively reduce location error. On this basis, we propose a hybrid RSS/CSI localization algorithm (HRCL), which is designed based on the deep learning. The HRCL fully exploits quick construction of fingerprint database with the coarse-grained RSS and rich multipath information of the fine-grained CSI. The RSS and CSI with high correlation are selected to construct fingerprint database, aiming to improve localization accuracy. Moreover, the deep neural network is trained for location estimation. Especially, experimental results validate that the location error of HRCL can be reduced by 64.4%, compared with the existing localization method. Moreover, the location error of HRCL can be reduced by 29.1 %, compared with HRCL without RSS/CSI selection by correlation coefficient.

Abstract. Indoor localization has attracted the attention of researchers for wide applications in areas like construction, facility management, industries, logistics, and health. The Received Signal Strength (RSS) based fingerprinting method is widely adopted because it has a lower cost over other methods. RSS is a measurement of the power present in the received radio signal. While this fingerprinting method is very popular, there is a significant amount of effort required for collecting fingerprints for indoor space. In this paper, we propose an RSS fingerprinting method using Augmented Reality (AR) that does not rely on an external sensor resulting in ease of use and maintenance. This method uses spatial mapping techniques to help align the floor plan of existing buildings; then, after the alignment, we map local device coordinates to global coordinates. After this process, we partition the space in equally distanced reference points for RSS fingerprint collection. We developed an application for Microsoft HoloLens to align the floor plan and collect fingerprints on reference points. Then we tested collected fingerprints with existing RSS based indoor localization methods for its accuracy and performance.

Received signal strength (RSS) fingerprint-based indoor localization has received increasing popularity over the past decades. However, it suffers from the high calibration effort for fingerprint collection. In this paper, a Centralized indooR localizatioN method using Pseudo-label (CRNP) is proposed, which employs a small set of labeled data (RSS fingerprint) along with large volumes of unlabeled data (RSS values without coordinates) to reduce the workload of labeled data collection and improve the indoor localization performance. However, the rich location data is large in quantity and privacy sensitive, which may lead to high network cost (i.e., data transmission cost, data storage cost) and potential privacy leakage for data transmission to the central server. Therefore, a decentralized indoor localization method incorporating CRNP and federated learning is devised, which keeps the location data on local users' devices and improves the shared CRNP model by aggregating users' updates of the model. The experiment results demonstrate that (i) the proposed CRNP enables to improve the indoor localization accuracy by using unlabeled crowdsourced data; (ii) the designed decentralized scheme is robust to different data distribution and is capable to reduce the network cost and prevent users' privacy leakage.

We present ACMI, an FM-based indoor localization system that does not require proactive site profiling. ACMI constructs the fingerprint database based on pure estimation of indoor RSS (received signal strength) distribution, where only the signals transmitted from commercial FM radio stations are used. Based on extensive field measurement study, we established our own signal propagation model that harnesses FM radio characteristics and open information of FM transmission towers in combination with the floor-plan of a building. Output of the model is an RSS fingerprint database. Using the fingerprint database as a knowledge base, ACMI refines a positioning result via the two-step process; parameter calibration and path matching, during its runtime. Without site profiling, our evaluation indicates that ACMI in 7 campus locations and 3 downtown buildings using 8 distinguished FM stations finds positions with only about 6 and 10 meters of errors on average, respectively.

Crowdsensing is more and more used nowadays for indoor localization based on Received Signal Strength (RSS) fingerprinting. It is a fast and efficient solution to maintain fingerprinting databases and to keep them up-to-date. There are however several challenges involved in crowdsensing RSS fingerprinting data, and these have been little investigated so far in the current literature. Our goal is to analyse the impact of various error sources in the crowdsensing process for the purpose of indoor localization. We rely our findings on a heavy measurement campaign involving 21 measurement devices and more than 6800 fingerprints. We show that crowdsensed databases are more robust to erroneous RSS reports than to malicious fingerprint position reports. We also evaluate the positioning accuracy achievable with crowdsensed databases in the absence of any available calibration.

In fingerprint-based localization systems, clustering fingerprint databases is a proposed technique for improving localization accuracy while reducing localization time. Among various clustering algorithms, density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise (DBSCAN) stands out for its robustness to outliers and ability to accommodate fingerprint databases of various shapes. However, the clustering performance of the DBSCAN algorithm is heavily influenced by the type of similarity measure metric used, with most researchers using distance-based metrics. This paper aims to enhance DBSCAN clustering by using a pattern-based metric known as the context similarity coefficient (CSC) instead of distance-based metrics. The CSC metric examines received signal strength (RSS) measurement patterns that form fingerprint vectors and assesses both linear and non-linear relationships between these vectors to determine similarity. Four publicly available fingerprint databases were used to evaluate the clustering performance with silhouette scores as a performance metric. The performance of the DBSCAN algorithm with the CSC metric is determined and compared to Euclidean and Manhattan distances as similarity measure metrics. Simulation results indicate that achieving good clustering performance with the DBSCAN algorithm requires generating three or fewer clusters. The proposed CSC metric demonstrated the best clustering performance in two of four fingerprint databases and the second-best in another. However, computational complexity comparisons reveal that the CSC metric is highly computationally intensive and is suggested to be used on small to medium-sized fingerprint databases generated using an odd number of wireless APs deployed in a non-uniform or non-grid-like distribution.

The indoor pedestrian positioning methods are affected by substantial bias and errors because of the use of cheap microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) devices (e.g., gyroscope and accelerometer) and the users’ movements. Moreover, because radio-frequency (RF) signal values are changed drastically due to multipath fading and obstruction, the performance of RF-based localization systems may deteriorate in practice. To deal with this problem, various indoor localization methods that integrate the positional information gained from received signal strength (RSS) fingerprinting scheme and the motion of the user inferred by dead reckoning (DR) approach via Bayes filters have been suggested to accomplish more accurate localization results indoors. Among the Bayes filters, while the particle filter (PF) can offer the most accurate positioning performance, it may require substantial computation time due to use of many samples (particles) for high positioning accuracy. This paper introduces a pedestrian localization scheme performed on a mobile phone that leverages the RSS fingerprint-based method, dead reckoning (DR), and improved PF called a double-stacked particle filter (DSPF) in indoor environments. As a key element of our system, the DSPF algorithm is employed to correct the position of the user by fusing noisy location data gained by the RSS fingerprinting and DR schemes. By estimating the position of the user through the proposal distribution and target distribution obtained from multiple measurements, the DSPF method can offer better localization results compared to the Kalman filtering-based methods, and it can achieve competitive localization accuracy compared with PF while offering higher computational efficiency than PF. Experimental results demonstrate that the DSPF algorithm can achieve accurate and reliable localization with higher efficiency in computational cost compared with PF in indoor environments.

An effective location fingerprint model for wireless indoor localization

Location fingerprinting in WiFi positioning has been widely used in indoor environments. The key issue of the fingerprinting technology is the fingerprint database. The disadvantages of this technology are the database generation and maintenance requirements. The conventional method to create the database is that people carry out the survey manually (that is what the commercial products are doing). When the environment changes significantly (such as after a building renovation, or moving of furniture), the database has to be rebuilt. This paper proposes a new method to build and maintain the database in an efficient manner. This method only requires persons to carry a specific device which consists of a Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) reader and WiFi scanner to log the coordinates and the WiFi signal strengths. The coordinates are provided by some pre-deployed medium range (1–2 meters) RFID tags in the building with a location technique based on ‘cell ID’. As the persons conducting the survey are moving around the area of interest for purposes other than the fingerprint survey (such as a security guard who regularly patrols the whole building anyway), so the fingerprint database can be generated “automatically”. Also, the database can be refined as the data are being accumulated. When the environment changes, it can be detected by the self-refining database. A preliminary test was carried out for the proposed method. The results show that it works well.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is an emerging paradigm to integrate the physical world into cyber systems by connecting various devices, which sense and control the surrounding objects. For the upcoming IoT era, narrow-band signals will play an important role in the exchange of sensor data and control signals in IoT networks. Indoor positioning is critical for many IoT applications, such as asset tracking, smart buildings, smart e-health, and smart cities, but it is very challenging to achieve accurate indoor positioning with narrowband signals because of multipath propagation. In this paper, we design a positioning system using narrowband signals, particularly ZigBee signals, based on an enhanced fingerprinting algorithm by fusing received signal strength (RSS) and time information. We first investigate the feasibility of time-based fingerprinting by handling the challenges as synchronization compensation among anchor nodes and design of sub-sample timestamps with a resolution of nanoseconds. Second, we design a feature-based fusion approach to fuse and standardize time and RSS fingerprints. Third, we adopt a random forest regression model to design an enhanced pattern matching algorithm for fingerprinting. We implement the proposed algorithms with software-defined radio techniques. In the given experiment results, we find that the positioning system achieves a mean positioning accuracy of 1.61 m, which represents a 36.1% improvement over traditional RSS-based fingerprinting.