K-Means Fingerprint Clustering for Low-Complexity Floor Estimation in Indoor Mobile Localization

Indoor localization in multi-floor buildings is an important research problem. Finding the correct floor, in a fast and efficient manner, in a shopping mall or an unknown university building can save the users' search time and can enable a myriad of Location Based Services in the future. One of the most widely spread techniques for floor estimation in multi-floor buildings is the fingerprinting-based localization using Received Signal Strength (RSS) measurements coming from indoor networks, such as WLAN and BLE. The clear advantage of RSS-based floor estimation is its ease of implementation on a multitude of mobile devices at the Application Programming Interface (API) level, because RSS values are directly accessible through API interface. However, the downside of a fingerprinting approach, especially for large-scale floor estimation and positioning solutions, is their need to store and transmit a huge amount of fingerprinting data. The problem becomes more severe when the localization is intended to be done on mobile devices which have limited memory, power, and computational resources. An alternative floor estimation method, which has lower complexity and is faster than the fingerprinting is the Weighted Centroid Localization (WCL) method. The trade-off is however paid in terms of a lower accuracy than the one obtained with traditional fingerprinting with Nearest Neighbour (NN) estimates. In this paper a novel K-means-based method for floor estimation via fingerprint clustering of WiFi and various other positioning sensor outputs is introduced. Our method achieves a floor estimation accuracy close to the one with NN fingerprinting, while significantly improves the complexity and the speed of the floor detection algorithm. The decrease in the database size is achieved through storing and transmitting only the cluster heads (CH's) and their corresponding floor labels.Comment: Accepted to IEEE Globecom 2015, Workshop on Localization and Tracking: Indoors, Outdoors and Emerging Network

A Survey of Positioning Systems Using Visible LED Lights

© 2018 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.As Global Positioning System (GPS) cannot provide satisfying performance in indoor environments, indoor positioning technology, which utilizes indoor wireless signals instead of GPS signals, has grown rapidly in recent years. Meanwhile, visible light communication (VLC) using light devices such as light emitting diodes (LEDs) has been deemed to be a promising candidate in the heterogeneous wireless networks that may collaborate with radio frequencies (RF) wireless networks. In particular, light-fidelity has a great potential for deployment in future indoor environments because of its high throughput and security advantages. This paper provides a comprehensive study of a novel positioning technology based on visible white LED lights, which has attracted much attention from both academia and industry. The essential characteristics and principles of this system are deeply discussed, and relevant positioning algorithms and designs are classified and elaborated. This paper undertakes a thorough investigation into current LED-based indoor positioning systems and compares their performance through many aspects, such as test environment, accuracy, and cost. It presents indoor hybrid positioning systems among VLC and other systems (e.g., inertial sensors and RF systems). We also review and classify outdoor VLC positioning applications for the first time. Finally, this paper surveys major advances as well as open issues, challenges, and future research directions in VLC positioning systems.Peer reviewe

Location-free Spectrum Cartography

Spectrum cartography constructs maps of metrics such as channel gain or received signal power across a geographic area of interest using spatially distributed sensor measurements. Applications of these maps include network planning, interference coordination, power control, localization, and cognitive radios to name a few. Since existing spectrum cartography techniques require accurate estimates of the sensor locations, their performance is drastically impaired by multipath affecting the positioning pilot signals, as occurs in indoor or dense urban scenarios. To overcome such a limitation, this paper introduces a novel paradigm for spectrum cartography, where estimation of spectral maps relies on features of these positioning signals rather than on location estimates. Specific learning algorithms are built upon this approach and offer a markedly improved estimation performance than existing approaches relying on localization, as demonstrated by simulation studies in indoor scenarios.Comment: 14 pages, 12 figures, 1 table. Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Signal Processin

Algorithm for Dynamic Fingerprinting Radio Map Creation Using IMU Measurements

While a vast number of location-based services appeared lately, indoor positioning solutions are developed to provide reliable position information in environments where traditionally used satellite-based positioning systems cannot provide access to accurate position estimates. Indoor positioning systems can be based on many technologies; however, radio networks and more precisely Wi-Fi networks seem to attract the attention of a majority of the research teams. The most widely used localization approach used in Wi-Fi-based systems is based on fingerprinting framework. Fingerprinting algorithms, however, require a radio map for position estimation. This paper will describe a solution for dynamic radio map creation, which is aimed to reduce the time required to build a radio map. The proposed solution is using measurements from IMUs (Inertial Measurement Units), which are processed with a particle filter dead reckoning algorithm. Reference points (RPs) generated by the implemented dead reckoning algorithm are then processed by the proposed reference point merging algorithm, in order to optimize the radio map size and merge similar RPs. The proposed solution was tested in a real-world environment and evaluated by the implementation of deterministic fingerprinting positioning algorithms, and the achieved results were compared with results achieved with a static radio map. The achieved results presented in the paper show that positioning algorithms achieved similar accuracy even with a dynamic map with a low density of reference points

An Enhanced Indoor Positioning Method Based on Wi-Fi RSS Fingerprinting

In WiFi-based indoor positioning, the received signal strength (RSS) measurements are commonly used to estimate the mobile user location. However, these measurements significantly fluctuate over time and are susceptible to human movement, multipath and Non-Line-of-Sight (NLOS) propagation, which reduce the location accuracy. In this paper, an enhancement positioning method based on the nearest neighbor algorithm is proposed. The distribution of the RSS samples recorded from several Access Points (APs) are used rather than their average, for reducing the location errors introduced by the RSS variations and the multipath problem. The proposed algorithm, named the Nearest Kth Nearest Neighbor (NK-NN) is experimentally evaluated and compared to other powerful methods. The results show that the proposed method outperforms these methods