NomLoc: Calibration-Free Indoor Localization with Nomadic Access Points

Abstract

Newly popular indoor location-based services (ILBS), when integrated with commerce and public safety, offer a promising land for wireless indoor localization technologies. WLAN is suggested to be one of the most potential candidates owing to its prevalent infrastructure (i.e., access points (APs)) and low cost. However, the overall performance can be greatly degraded by the spatial localizability variance problem, i.e., the localization accuracy across various locations may have significant differences given any fixed AP deployment. As a result, it brings in user experience inconsistency which is unfavorable for ILBS. In this paper, we propose NomLoc - an indoor localization system using nomadic APs to address the performance variance problem. The key insight of NomLoc is to leverage the mobility of nomadic APs to dynamically adjust the WLAN network topology. A space partition (SP)-based localization algorithm is tailored for NomLoc to perform calibration-free positioning. Moreover, fine-grained channel state information (CSI) is employed to mitigate the performance degradation of the SP-based method due to multipath and none-line-of-sight (NLOS) effects. We have implemented the NomLoc system with off-the-shelf devices and evaluated the performance in two typical indoor environments. The results show that NomLoc can greatly mitigate spatial localizability variance and improve localization accuracy with the assistance of nomadic APs as compared with the corresponding static AP deployment. Moreover, it is robust to the position error of nomadic APs.