Abstract
Positioning capabilities have become essential in context-aware user services, which make easier daily activities and let the emergence of new business models in the trendy area of smart cities. Thanks to wireless connection capabilities of smart mobile devices and the proliferation of wireless attachment points in buildings, several positioning systems have appeared in the last years to provide indoor positioning and complement GPS for outdoors. Wi-Fi fingerprinting is one of the most remarkable approaches, although ongoing smart deployments in the area of smart cities can offer extra possibilities to exploit hybrid schemes, in which the final location takes into account different positioning sources. In this paper we propose a positioning system that leverages common infrastructure and services already present in smart spaces to enhance indoor positioning. Thus, GPS and WiFi are complemented with access control services (i.e., ID card) or Bluetooth Low Energy beaconing, to determine the user location within a smart space. Better position estimations can be calculated by hybridizing the positioning information coming from different technologies, and a handover mechanism between technologies or algorithms is used exploiting semantic information saved in fingerprints. The solution implemented is highly optimized by reducing tedious computation, by means of opportunistic selection of fingerprints and floor change detection, and a battery saving subsystem reduces power consumption by disabling non-needed technologies. The proposal has been showcased over a smart campus deployment to check its real operation and assess the positioning accuracy, experiencing the noticeable advantage of integrating technologies usually available in smart spaces and reaching an average real error of 4.62 m.
Highlights
In the last decades, boosted by the appearance and proliferation of smartphones, many indoor positioning systems have been developed
The solution proposed in [12] uses a promising handover algorithm for switching between indoor and outdoor technologies. This is achieved thanks to the light and magnetic measurements made by the smartphone sensors, selecting GPS technology for outdoors and the pedestrian dead reckoning (PDR) algorithm for indoors
A collaborative/hybrid positioning approach has been designed on the basis of usual positioning sources and some extra indoor positioning technologies and algorithms coming from smart spaces
Summary
In the last decades, boosted by the appearance and proliferation of smartphones, many indoor positioning systems have been developed. It is necessary to register the fingerprints and the installed base stations, such as WiFi access points or Bluetooth tags In our case, this application has been developed for Android platform, as reference app that integrates and tests our positioning library developed in Java. An important contribution to the solution presented in this paper is the way different positioning technologies integrate to get better position estimations, and a reduction of required computation effort and, energy consumption, prolonging the life of smartphone batteries. This is implemented through an intelligent handover mechanism between technologies or algorithms, which is fed by extra semantics included in the fingerprints.
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