Modelling the Effect of Human Body around User on Signal Strength and Accuracy of Indoor Positioning

WLAN indoor positioning system (IPS) has high accurate of position estimation and minimal cost. However, environmental conditions such as the people presence effect (PPE) greatly influence WLAN signal and it will decrease the accuracy. This research modelled the effect of people around user on signal strength and the accuracy. We have modelled the human body around user effects by proposed a general equation of decrease in RSSI as function of position, distance, and number of people. RSSI decreased from 5 dBm to 1 dBm when people in LOS position, and start from 0.5 dBm to 0.3 dBm when people in NLOS position. The system accuracy decreases due to the presence of people. When the system in NLOS case (ΔRSSI = 0.5 dBm), the presence of people causes a decrease in accuracy from 33% to 57%. Then the accuracy decrease from 273% to 334% in LOS case (ΔRSSI = 5 dBm)

Modelling the effect of human body around user on signal strength and accuracy of indoor positioning

WLAN indoor positioning system (IPS) has high accurate of position estimation and minimal cost. However, environmental conditions such as the people presence effect (PPE) greatly influence WLAN signal and it will decrease the accuracy. This research modelled the effect of people around user on signal strength and the accuracy. We have modelled the human body around user effects by proposed a general equation of decrease in signal strength as function of position, distance, and number of people. Signal strength decreased from 5 dBm to 1 dBm when people in line of sight (LOS) position, and start from 0.5 dBm to 0.3 dBm when people in non-line of sight (NLOS) position. The system accuracy decreases due to the presence of people. When the system is in NLOS case, the presence of people causes a decrease in accuracy from 33% to 57%. Then the accuracy decrease from 273% to 334% in LOS case

Indoor positioning model based on people effect and ray tracing propagation

WLAN-fingerprinting has been highlighted as the preferred technology in an Indoor Positioning System (IPS) due to its accurate positioning results and minimal infrastructure cost. However, the accuracy of IPS fingerprinting is highly influenced by the fluctuation in signal strength as a result of encountering obstacles. Many researchers have modelled static obstacles such as walls and ceilings, but hardly any have modelled the effect of people presence as an obstacle although the human body significantly impacts signal strength. Hence, the people presence effect must be considered to obtain highly accurate positioning results. Previous research proposed a model that only considered the direct path between the transmitter and the receiver. However, for indoor propagation, multipath effects such as reflection can also have a significant influence, but were not considered in past work. Therefore, this research proposes an accurate indoor positioning model that considers people presence using a ray tracing (AIRY) model in a dynamic environment which relies on existing infrastructure. Three solutions were proposed to construct AIRY: an automatic radio map using ray tracing (ARM-RT), a new human model in ray tracing (HUMORY), and a people effect constant for received signal strength indicator (RSSI) adaptation. At the offline stage, 30 RSSIs were recorded at each point using a smartphone to create a radio map database (523 points). The real-time RSSI was then compared to the radio map database at the online stage using MATLAB software to determine the user position (65 test points). The proposed model was tested at Level 3 of Razak Tower, UTM Kuala Lumpur (80 × 16 m). To test the influence of people presence, the number, position, and distance of the people around the mobile device (MD) were varied. The results showed that the closer the people were to the MD in both the Line of Sight (LOS) and Non-LOS position, the greater the decrease in RSSI, in which the increment number of people will increase the amount of reflection signals to be blocked. The signal strength reduction started from 0.5 dBm with two people and reached 0.9 dBm with seven people. In addition, the ray tracing model produced smaller errors on RSSI prediction than the multi-wall model when considering the effect of people presence. The k-nearest neighbour (KNN) algorithm was used to define the position. The initial accuracy was improved from 2.04 m to 0.57 m after people presence and multipath effects were considered. In conclusion, the proposed model successfully increased indoor positioning accuracy in a dynamic environment by overcoming the people presence effect