WiFi Location Fingerprinting

Abstract

Positioning in indoor areas poses several challenges that cannot be easily overcome using GPS. Although the near-ubiquitous availability of WiFi in most indoor and campus areas of interest makes it an inexpensive choice (in terms of hardware) for positioning, WiFi was not designed with positioning as the application. Hence, traditional time or direction-of-arrival techniques are not suitable for positioning with WiFi. Alternatively, over the last decade, location fingerprinting has been widely suggested and investigated for positioning with WiFi indoors. This chapter provides an overview of WiFi location fingerprinting, the challenges therein, and emerging research and practical directions in the area.