On the choice of access point selection criterion and other position estimation characteristics for WLAN-based indoor positioning

Abstract

The positioning based on Wireless Local Area Networks (WLAN) is one of the most promising technologies for indoor location-based services, generally using the information carried by Received Signal Strengths (RSS). One challenge, however, is the huge amount of data in the radiomap database due to the enormous number of hearable Access Points (AP) that could make the positioning system very complex. This paper concentrates on WLAN-based indoor location by comparing fingerprinting, path loss and weighted centroid based positioning approaches in terms of complexity and performance and studying the effects of grid size and AP reduction with several choices for appropriate selection criterion. All results are based on real field measurements in three multi-floor buildings. We validate our earlier findings concerning several different AP selection criteria and conclude that the best results are obtained with a maximum RSS-based criterion, which also proved to be the most consistent among the different investigated approaches. We show that the weighted centroid based low-complexity method is very sensitive to AP reduction, while the path loss-based method is also very robust to high percentage removals. Indeed, for fingerprinting, 50% of the APs can be removed safely with a properly chosen removal criterion without increasing the positioning error much.