A Hybrid Positioning Scheme Exploiting Sensors and RSS of Wi-Fi Signals

Abstract

As interests and demands for indoor positioning have recently increased, a positioning scheme utilizing the smartphone equipped with various sensors like an acceleration sensor and a geomagnetic sensor has been expected as a high potential and practical candidate for indoor positioning purpose. The acceleration sensor and the geomagnetic sensor are used for the estimation of travelled distance and the direction of movement of pedestrians, respectively. Although it provides very accurate positioning performance, the positioning scheme based only sensors tends to be affected by indoor environments like magnetic field of general indoor office building. In addition, the positioning error is apt to be accumulated as the travelled distance is increased. In this paper, therefore, a new positioning scheme is proposed to compensate the conventional positioning technology and to enhance the positioning performance. The proposed scheme consists with positioning based sensors, multi-lateration and WLAN-ID based on received signal strength (RSS) of Wi-Fi signals. The proposed scheme is evaluated with experiments at general building in university and the performance of the proposed scheme is superior to the conventional schemes such as a positioning scheme with only sensors and a positioning scheme based on RSS of Wi-Fi signals only.