A Novel Wifi-Based Indoor Localization System

This paper proposes a novel Wi-Fi based indoor localization system. Specially designed Wi-Fi beacons are set up to detect the real time signal strengths of Wi-Fi access points and send this data to a server. By establishing the distances along flat planes between beacons and a mobile tag, the location of the mobile tag is estimated by finding the most likely intersection between the planes corresponding to the tag. This proposed approach eliminates several bottlenecks that affect time and cost efficiency, as the localization technique developed in this project uses the relative signal strengths of the smartphone compared to signal strengths recorded at beacon devices. This eliminates the requirements of having control of and location knowledge of Wi-Fi access points. Preliminary experimentation results show that the proposed approach can achieve a localization accuracy comparable to a fingerprint approach.