Virtual AP based indoor localization in area without linear constraints

Abstract

For narrow areas such as corridors, the positioning accuracy can be significantly improved by using behavioral landmarks and electronic indoor maps. However, in wide indoor areas without linear constraints,such as offices, shops and airport halls, the use of inertial sensors and indoor map cannot achieve a significant performance gain. Virtual access point (AP) is the "virtual position" of AP calculated by using the simplified formula of wireless signal attenuation with reference points.Based on this, a fingerprint point clustering algorithm based on virtual AP coordinates has been proposed in offline phase. An AP selection algorithm based on eight-diagram has been proposed to reduce the calculation amount of online positioning. Finally, experiments conducted in different office buildings demonstrated that the positioning accuracy of the proposed algorithms is considerably better than that of the traditional methods