Indoor location determination: taking a step back.
Date
2012-08-28
Authors
Pearson, Christopher
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Abstract
Along with the huge growth of mobile devices in recent years we have seen a
matching growth in interest for mobile applications, with location-aware applications
experiencing rapid growth for mobile devices. Radiolocation from measurements of
radio received signal strength has demonstrated excellent precision, although despite
a decade of research there have been no wide-spread deployments of indoor location
systems. The majority of the existing research has been focused towards producing
improved precision at the cost of increased time requirements for system
configuration and maintenance. This thesis proposes taking a step back from
increasing complexity by giving up precision in exchange for simplicity and speed of
deployment, while still providing sufficient accuracy for many indoor location tasks.
This is accomplished by putting aside the standard x, y, z coordinate systems and by
using a method based on defined areas. Carefully choosing the defined areas to
include Wi-Fi access points and to have signal attenuating walls separating the area
from the next, this work demonstrates locational accuracy of over 90% in most cases.
While this method is not applicable to wide open areas that lack signal attenuating
features, it is highly applicable to many indoor environments.
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Keywords
Wi-Fi, indoor location, mobile devices