Transfer Learning-Based Outdoor Position Recovery with Telco Data

Telecommunication (Telco) outdoor position recovery aims to localize outdoor mobile devices by leveraging measurement report (MR) data. Unfortunately, Telco position recovery requires sufficient amount of MR samples across different areas and suffers from high data collection cost. For an area with scarce MR samples, it is hard to achieve good accuracy. In this paper, by leveraging the recently developed transfer learning techniques, we design a novel Telco position recovery framework, called TLoc, to transfer good models in the carefully selected source domains (those fine-grained small subareas) to a target one which originally suffers from poor localization accuracy. Specifically, TLoc introduces three dedicated components: 1) a new coordinate space to divide an area of interest into smaller domains, 2) a similarity measurement to select best source domains, and 3) an adaptation of an existing transfer learning approach. To the best of our knowledge, TLoc is the first framework that demonstrates the efficacy of applying transfer learning in the Telco outdoor position recovery. To exemplify, on the 2G GSM and 4G LTE MR datasets in Shanghai, TLoc outperforms a nontransfer approach by 27.58% and 26.12% less median errors, and further leads to 47.77% and 49.22% less median errors than a recent fingerprinting approach NBL

A Comprehensive Survey of Machine Learning Based Localization with Wireless Signals

The last few decades have witnessed a growing interest in location-based services. Using localization systems based on Radio Frequency (RF) signals has proven its efficacy for both indoor and outdoor applications. However, challenges remain with respect to both complexity and accuracy of such systems. Machine Learning (ML) is one of the most promising methods for mitigating these problems, as ML (especially deep learning) offers powerful practical data-driven tools that can be integrated into localization systems. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey of ML-based localization solutions that use RF signals. The survey spans different aspects, ranging from the system architectures, to the input features, the ML methods, and the datasets. A main point of the paper is the interaction between the domain knowledge arising from the physics of localization systems, and the various ML approaches. Besides the ML methods, the utilized input features play a major role in shaping the localization solution; we present a detailed discussion of the different features and what could influence them, be it the underlying wireless technology or standards or the preprocessing techniques. A detailed discussion is dedicated to the different ML methods that have been applied to localization problems, discussing the underlying problem and the solution structure. Furthermore, we summarize the different ways the datasets were acquired, and then list the publicly available ones. Overall, the survey categorizes and partly summarizes insights from almost 400 papers in this field. This survey is self-contained, as we provide a concise review of the main ML and wireless propagation concepts, which shall help the researchers in either field navigate through the surveyed solutions, and suggested open problems