Measurement-based AP deployment mechanism for fingerprint-based indoor location systems

Abstract

Recently, deploying WiFi access points (APs) for facilitating indoor localization has attracted increasing attention. However, most existing mechanisms in this aspect are typically simulation based and further they did not consider how to jointly utilize pre-existing APs in target environment and newly deployed APs for achieving high localization performance. In this paper, we propose a measurement-based AP deployment mechanism (MAPD) for placing APs in target indoor environment for assisting fingerprint based indoor localization. In the mechanism design, MAPD takes full consideration of pre-existing APs to assist the selection of good candidate positions for deploying new APs. For this purpose, we first choose a number of candidate positions with low location accuracy on a radio map calibrated using the pre-existing APs and then use over-deployment and on-site measurement to determine the actual positions for AP deployment. MAPD uses minimal mean location error and progressive greedy search for actual AP position selection. Experimental results demonstrate that MAPD can largely reduce the localization error as compared with existing work.