WiFi-based indoor positioning

Abstract

Recently, several indoor localization solutions based on WiFi, Bluetooth, and UWB have been proposed. Due to the limitation and complexity of the indoor environment, the solution to achieve a low-cost and accurate positioning system remains open. This article presents a WiFibased positioning technique that can improve the localization performance from the bottleneck in ToA/AoA. Unlike the traditional approaches, our proposed mechanism relaxes the need for wide signal bandwidth and large numbers of antennas by utilizing the transmission of multiple predefined messages while maintaining high-accuracy performance. The overall system structure is demonstrated by showing localization performance with respect to different numbers of messages used in 20/40 MHz bandwidth WiFi APs. Simulation results show that our WiFi-based positioning approach can achieve 1 m accuracy without any hardware change in commercial WiFi products, which is much better than the conventional solutions from both academia and industry concerning the trade-off of cost and system complexity.