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

Performance Evaluation of Mobile U-Navigation based on GPS/WLAN Hybridization

This paper present our mobile u-navigation system. This approach utilizes hybridization of wireless local area network and Global Positioning System internal sensor which to receive signal strength from access point and the same time retrieve Global Navigation System Satellite signal. This positioning information will be switched based on type of environment in order to ensure the ubiquity of positioning system. Finally we present our results to illustrate the performance of the localization system for an indoor/ outdoor environment set-up.Comment: Journal of Convergence Information Technology(JCIT

RF Localization in Indoor Environment

In this paper indoor localization system based on the RF power measurements of the Received Signal Strength (RSS) in WLAN environment is presented. Today, the most viable solution for localization is the RSS fingerprinting based approach, where in order to establish a relationship between RSS values and location, different machine learning approaches are used. The advantage of this approach based on WLAN technology is that it does not need new infrastructure (it reuses already and widely deployed equipment), and the RSS measurement is part of the normal operating mode of wireless equipment. We derive the Cramer-Rao Lower Bound (CRLB) of localization accuracy for RSS measurements. In analysis of the bound we give insight in localization performance and deployment issues of a localization system, which could help designing an efficient localization system. To compare different machine learning approaches we developed a localization system based on an artificial neural network, k-nearest neighbors, probabilistic method based on the Gaussian kernel and the histogram method. We tested the developed system in real world WLAN indoor environment, where realistic RSS measurements were collected. Experimental comparison of the results has been investigated and average location estimation error of around 2 meters was obtained

AROMA: Automatic Generation of Radio Maps for Localization Systems

WLAN localization has become an active research field recently. Due to the wide WLAN deployment, WLAN localization provides ubiquitous coverage and adds to the value of the wireless network by providing the location of its users without using any additional hardware. However, WLAN localization systems usually require constructing a radio map, which is a major barrier of WLAN localization systems' deployment. The radio map stores information about the signal strength from different signal strength streams at selected locations in the site of interest. Typical construction of a radio map involves measurements and calibrations making it a tedious and time-consuming operation. In this paper, we present the AROMA system that automatically constructs accurate active and passive radio maps for both device-based and device-free WLAN localization systems. AROMA has three main goals: high accuracy, low computational requirements, and minimum user overhead. To achieve high accuracy, AROMA uses 3D ray tracing enhanced with the uniform theory of diffraction (UTD) to model the electric field behavior and the human shadowing effect. AROMA also automates a number of routine tasks, such as importing building models and automatic sampling of the area of interest, to reduce the user's overhead. Finally, AROMA uses a number of optimization techniques to reduce the computational requirements. We present our system architecture and describe the details of its different components that allow AROMA to achieve its goals. We evaluate AROMA in two different testbeds. Our experiments show that the predicted signal strength differs from the measurements by a maximum average absolute error of 3.18 dBm achieving a maximum localization error of 2.44m for both the device-based and device-free cases.Comment: 14 pages, 17 figure