Sensing motion using spectral and spatial analysis of WLAN RSSI

In this paper we present how motion sensing can be obtained just by observing the WLAN radio signal strength and its fluctuations. The temporal, spectral and spatial characteristics of WLAN signal are analyzed. Our analysis confirms our claim that ’signal strength from access points appear to jump around more vigorously when the device is moving compared to when it is still and the number of detectable access points vary considerably while the user is on the move’. Using this observation, we present a novel motion detection algorithm, Spectrally Spread Motion Detection (SpecSMD) based on the spectral analysis of WLAN signal’s RSSI. To benchmark the proposed algorithm, we used Spatially Spread Motion Detection (SpatSMD), which is inspired by the recent work of Sohn et al. Both algorithms were evaluated by carrying out extensive measurements in a diverse set of conditions (indoors in different buildings and outdoors - city center, parking lot, university campus etc.,) and tested against the same data sets. The 94% average classification accuracy of the proposed SpecSMD is outperforming the accuracy of SpatSMD (accuracy 87%). The motion detection algorithms presented in this paper provide ubiquitous methods for deriving the state of the user. The algorithms can be implemented and run on a commodity device with WLAN capability without the need of any additional hardware support

Technologies and solutions for location-based services in smart cities: past, present, and future

Location-based services (LBS) in smart cities have drastically altered the way cities operate, giving a new dimension to the life of citizens. LBS rely on location of a device, where proximity estimation remains at its core. The applications of LBS range from social networking and marketing to vehicle-toeverything communications. In many of these applications, there is an increasing need and trend to learn the physical distance between nearby devices. This paper elaborates upon the current needs of proximity estimation in LBS and compares them against the available Localization and Proximity (LP) finding technologies (LP technologies in short). These technologies are compared for their accuracies and performance based on various different parameters, including latency, energy consumption, security, complexity, and throughput. Hereafter, a classification of these technologies, based on various different smart city applications, is presented. Finally, we discuss some emerging LP technologies that enable proximity estimation in LBS and present some future research areas

Evaluating indoor positioning systems in a shopping mall : the lessons learned from the IPIN 2018 competition

The Indoor Positioning and Indoor Navigation (IPIN) conference holds an annual competition in which indoor localization systems from different research groups worldwide are evaluated empirically. The objective of this competition is to establish a systematic evaluation methodology with rigorous metrics both for real-time (on-site) and post-processing (off-site) situations, in a realistic environment unfamiliar to the prototype developers. For the IPIN 2018 conference, this competition was held on September 22nd, 2018, in Atlantis, a large shopping mall in Nantes (France). Four competition tracks (two on-site and two off-site) were designed. They consisted of several 1 km routes traversing several floors of the mall. Along these paths, 180 points were topographically surveyed with a 10 cm accuracy, to serve as ground truth landmarks, combining theodolite measurements, differential global navigation satellite system (GNSS) and 3D scanner systems. 34 teams effectively competed. The accuracy score corresponds to the third quartile (75th percentile) of an error metric that combines the horizontal positioning error and the floor detection. The best results for the on-site tracks showed an accuracy score of 11.70 m (Track 1) and 5.50 m (Track 2), while the best results for the off-site tracks showed an accuracy score of 0.90 m (Track 3) and 1.30 m (Track 4). These results showed that it is possible to obtain high accuracy indoor positioning solutions in large, realistic environments using wearable light-weight sensors without deploying any beacon. This paper describes the organization work of the tracks, analyzes the methodology used to quantify the results, reviews the lessons learned from the competition and discusses its future

RFID Localisation For Internet Of Things Smart Homes: A Survey

The Internet of Things (IoT) enables numerous business opportunities in fields as diverse as e-health, smart cities, smart homes, among many others. The IoT incorporates multiple long-range, short-range, and personal area wireless networks and technologies into the designs of IoT applications. Localisation in indoor positioning systems plays an important role in the IoT. Location Based IoT applications range from tracking objects and people in real-time, assets management, agriculture, assisted monitoring technologies for healthcare, and smart homes, to name a few. Radio Frequency based systems for indoor positioning such as Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is a key enabler technology for the IoT due to its costeffective, high readability rates, automatic identification and, importantly, its energy efficiency characteristic. This paper reviews the state-of-the-art RFID technologies in IoT Smart Homes applications. It presents several comparable studies of RFID based projects in smart homes and discusses the applications, techniques, algorithms, and challenges of adopting RFID technologies in IoT smart home systems.Comment: 18 pages, 2 figures, 3 table

Indoor Distance Estimation using LSTMs over WLAN Network

The Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) like GPS suffer from accuracy degradation and are almost unavailable in indoor environments. Indoor positioning systems (IPS) based on WiFi signals have been gaining popularity. However, owing to the strong spatial and temporal variations of wireless communication channels in the indoor environment, the achieved accuracy of existing IPS is around several tens of centimeters. We present the detailed design and implementation of a self-adaptive WiFi-based indoor distance estimation system using LSTMs. The system is novel in its method of estimating with high accuracy the distance of an object by overcoming possible causes of channel variations and is self-adaptive to the changing environmental and surrounding conditions. The proposed design has been developed and physically realized over a WiFi network consisting of ESP8266 (NodeMCU) devices. The experiment were conducted in a real indoor environment while changing the surroundings in order to establish the adaptability of the system. We introduce and compare different architectures for this task based on LSTMs, CNNs, and fully connected networks (FCNs). We show that the LSTM based model performs better among all the above-mentioned architectures by achieving an accuracy of 5.85 cm with a confidence interval of 93% on the scale of (4.14 m * 2.86 m). To the best of our knowledge, the proposed method outperforms other methods reported in the literature by a significant margin.Comment: Published in IEEE 16th Workshop on Positioning, Navigation and Communications (WPNC 2019, Germany

Spatio-temporal (S-T) similarity model for constructing WIFI-based RSSI fingerprinting map for indoor localization

WIFI-based received signal strength indicator (RSSI) fingerprinting is widely used for indoor localization due to desirable features such as universal availability, privacy protection, and low deployment cost. The key of RSSI fingerprinting is to construct a trustworthy RSSI map, which contains the measurements of received access point (AP) signal strengths at different calibration points. Location can be estimated by matching live RSSIs with the RSSI map. However, a fine-grained map requires much labor and time. This calls for developing efficient interpolation and approximation methods. Besides, due to environmental changes, the RSSI map requires periodical updates to guarantee localization accuracy. In this paper, we propose a spatio-temporal (S-T) similarity model which uses the S-T correlation to construct a fine-grained and up-to-date RSSI map. Five S-T correlation metrics are proposed, i.e., the spatial distance, signal similarity, similarity likelihood, RSSI vector distance, and the S-T reliability. This model is evaluated based on experiments in our indoor WIFI positioning system test bed. Results show improvements in both the interpolation accuracy (up to 7%) and localization accuracy (up to 32%), compared to four commonly used RSSI map construction methods, namely, linear interpolation, cubic interpolation, nearest neighbor interpolation, and compressive sensing.postprin

AN INDOOR BLUETOOTH-CENTRIC PROXIMITY BASED POSITIONING SYSTEM

In recent years, positioning and navigation become an important topic in research. The most popular positioning system is an outdoor positioning called Global Positioning System (GPS). However, due to the influence of weak signal strength, weather conditions, diverse geographical and living environments, GPS sometimes cannot support indoor positioning and, if it can, the 5-10 meters error range does not meet the indoor positioning requirement. In order to provide a better solution with higher accuracy for indoor localization, we can benefit from the proliferation of indoor communication devices. Different technologies such as WiFi, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) and Ultra-wideband (UWB) have been commonly used in indoor positioning systems. However, WiFi has a high energy consumption for indoor localization, as it consumes 3 to 10 watts per hour in the case of using 3 routers to do the job. In addition, due to its dependency on reference tags, the overall cost of the RFID-based approaches may usually cost more than $300 which is economically prohibitive. In terms of UWB, its low area coverage brings great challenges to popularizing its acceptance as a device for indoor positioning. The Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) based iBeacon solution primarily focuses on the proximity based detection, and its low power consumption and low price bring great potential for its popularity. In this report, assuming that the resident owns a smartphone which is powered on, we present an iBeacon based indoor positioning system and provide some strategies and algorithms to overcome the indoor noise of possibly weak indoor Bluetooth signals. In our system, the Received Signal Strength Index (RSSI) is pre-processed to eliminate noise. Then, the distance between a mobile device and a BLE signal source can be calculated by combination use of pre-processed RSSI, Kalman Filter, and machine learning. In the end, the current mobile device position can be determined by using a triangulation algorithm. Our experimental results, acquired through running experiments in a real-world scenario, show that the localization error can be as low as 0.985m in the 2D environment. We also compared our results against other works with the same research objectives

STCP: Receiver-agnostic Communication Enabled by Space-Time Cloud Pointers

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (Computer Engineering)During the last decade, mobile communication technologies have rapidly evolved and ubiquitous network connectivity is nearly achieved. However, we observe that there are critical situations where none of the existing mobile communication technologies is usable. Such situations are often found when messages need to be delivered to arbitrary persons or devices that are located in a specific space at a specific time. For instance at a disaster scene, current communication methods are incapable of delivering messages of a rescuer to the group of people at a specific area even when their cellular connections are alive because the rescuer cannot specify the receivers of the messages. We name this as receiver-unknown problem and propose a viable solution called SpaceMessaging. SpaceMessaging adopts the idea of Post-it by which we casually deliver our messages to a person who happens to visit a location at a random moment. To enable SpaceMessaging, we realize the concept of posting messages to a space by implementing cloud-pointers at a cloud server to which messages can be posted and from which messages can fetched by arbitrary mobile devices that are located at that space. Our Android-based prototype of SpaceMessaging, which particularly maps a cloud-pointer to a WiFi signal fingerprint captured from mobile devices, demonstrates that it first allows mobile devices to deliver messages to a specific space and to listen to the messages of a specific space in a highly accurate manner (with more than 90% of Recall)