ILONA: indoor localization and navigation system

Abstract

Indoor positioning is a hot topic these days and there is a growing need for it in public buildings such as airports, hospitals, universities or shopping malls. Indoor positioning systems should be accurate, easily available for the users, with low installation and maintenance cost, which makes development challenging. Existing systems are based on various technologies such as ultrasonic, RFID, WiFi or light encoding. Moreover, these systems are tailored to a given environment and usually rely on a single technology. This paper presents the indoor localization and navigation (ILONA) System, a flexible hybrid indoor positioning and navigation framework. The ILONA System was not designed to be a solution for a single indoor positioning task but to be a standard core component of various systems. The ILONA System provides easily available positioning and navigation services for the end users. The system can manage data from the most commonly available sensors of modern smart phones. Thus, the ILONA System can perform positioning based on various technologies. ILONA System can be established at low cost because it only requires a connection between the server and the clients and WLAN is usually available. Hence, the presented ILONA System provides a widely available, hybrid indoor positioning framework at low cost to the developers of other indoor positioning solutions.