A calibration-free localization solution for handling signal strength variance

Abstract

In RSS-based indoor localization techniques, signal strength variance between diverse devices can significantly degrade the positional accuracy when using the radio map derived by train device to other test device. Current solutions employ extra calibration data from test device to solve this problem. In this paper, we present a calibration-free solution for handling the signal strength variance between diverse devices. The key idea is to generate radio map using signal strength differences between pairs of APs instead of absolute signal strength values. The proposed solution has been evaluated by extending with two well-known localization technologies. We evaluate our solution in a real-world indoor wireless environment and the results show that the proposed solution solves the signal strength variance problem without extra calibration on test device and performs equally to that of existing calibration-based method. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.