Improving RF fingerprinting methods by means of D2D communication protocol

Abstract

Radio Frequency (RF) fingerprinting is widely applied for indoor positioning due to the existing Wi-Fi infrastructure present in most indoor spaces (home, work, leisure, among others) and the widespread usage of smartphones everywhere. It corresponds to a simple idea, the signal signature in a location tends to be stable over the time. Therefore, with the signals received from multiple APs, a unique fingerprint can be created. However, the Wi-Fi signal is affected by many factors which degrade the positioning error range to around a few meters. This paper introduces a collaborative method based on device-to-device (D2D) communication to improve the positioning accuracy using only fingerprinting and the direct communication to nearby devices. The results presented in this paper show that the positioning error can be reduced around 44% by considering D2D communication in the operational stage without adding new infrastructure for fingerprinting or complex resource-consuming filters. Moreover, the presence of very large errors is significantly reduced when the collaborative positioning based on D2D is available.