Practical approximate indoor nearest neighbour locating with crowdsourced RSSIs

Abstract

In the indoor space, finding the nearest neighbour is of great importance in location-based services. Received Signal Strength Indication (RSSI) has received much attention due to its simplicity and compatibility with existing hardware, which has been widely used for indoor localization. Existing indoor nearest neighbour search methods are based on the real walking distance, which need ground survey and much labor work to measure many real distances. Crowdsourcing is a low-cost and efficient way to collect the RSSI of indoor space without expert surveyors and designated coordinates for RSSI collection points. The crowdsourced RSSIs can reflect the location of indoor objects and RSSI-based localization method is the simplistic method as it needs low hardware requirements, low deployment cost and no survey indoor distance. So we study how to search the nearest neighbour of indoor objects with crowdsourced RSSIs. To address this problem, we propose a graph with interval weights, called I-graph, which can connect the RSSIs and represent the topology of indoor space. We also construct a search tree index D-tree, which can index the graph with interval weights and search the nearest neighbour objects efficiently. We also propose a novel distance metric for RSSI and study the relationship between the RSSI distance and the indoor distance. To locate nearest neighbour of indoor objects with crowdsourced RSSIs, we devise efficient search algorithms and pruning strategies for computing the nearest neighbour query. We demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed solution through extensive experiments with two real data sets.