INDOOR POSITIONING USING WLAN FINGERPRINT MATCHING AND PATH ASSESSMENT WITH RETROACTIVE ADJUSTMENT ON MOBILE DEVICES

Abstract. With the increasing number and usage of mobile devices in people’s daily life, indoor positioning has attracted a lot attention from both academia and industry for the purpose of providing location-aware services. This work proposes an indoor positioning system, primarily based on WLAN fingerprint matching, that includes various minor improvements to improve the positioning accuracy of the algorithm, as well as improve the quality and reduce the collection time of the reference fingerprints. In addition, a novel Path Evaluation and Retroactive Adjustment module is employed; it intends to improve the positioning accuracy of the system in a similar fashion to a Pedestrian Dead Reckoning implemented along with WLAN Fingerprint Matching in a Sensor Fusion system. The benefit of this approach being that it avoids the requirement of inertial sensor data, as well as its intensive computation and power use, while providing a similar accuracy improvement to Pedestrian Dead Reckoning. Our experimental results demonstrate that this may be a viable approach for positioning using mobile devices in an indoor environment.